2018 pride reads #6
lgbt+ rep: side f/f romance

God, I wanted to enjoy this book so much , especially after so many people I trusted had enjoyed it, but I don't know what they all saw in it that I didn't.

The two aspects of this book that I enjoyed were the plot and the writing, but even those had their flaws. The plot was really interesting but there's about 200 pages of build-up and then 150 pages of really interesting plot, which was a ratio that didn't work. It meant that anytime something happened in the latter third it felt rushed and convenient. The writing was pretty good but there was something that kept annoying me: the use of the word 'like'. These are some examples just from the first chapter:

"... in our beater car that smells like French fries and stale coffee and plasticky strawberries..."
"... so red it looked like she'd cut herself."
"... that smelled like expensive French soap and wet Yorkies."
"She sucked in smoke like it was a milk shake..."
"The news hit me like a depth charge..."
"... it smelled like diner coffee and the smoke twining up from her cigarette."
"... walked straight-backed out of the room, like there was something she had to do."
"It even smelled like it had been sent from the past."
"... typing it up on an old Selectric, like the one in the..."

And that's just the first chapter, it continues throughout the whole book. Sometimes it's really effective (my favourite example was "It felt like stars had crawled into my joints and exploded." ) but mostly it was just annoying.

Now let's get into the things I didn't like. The characters and the relationships.

Alice was such an annoying main character. She was meant to be a complicated teenager with anger issues but she came off more like a whiney brat. That would have been fine but it seemed, at least to me, that she had absolutely no character development. She's also incredibly entitled, but I'll touched on that later.

Finch was fine. He served his purpose. He was too nice for his own good and that's about it. Every other character was incredibly forgettable and I felt like I had seen them all somewhere else. The only exception was Ella and, to be honest, I would have been more interested in reading a book about her childhood and her on the run with Alice.

I read in several reviews that there was a cute f/f romance in this book. There is an f/f romance in this, but it's so brief I don't even know if I can comment much on it. Let me put it this way: there was more about the relationship in Heir of Fire between one of the cooks and his mate than there was the relationship in this.

Finch and Alice's dynamic frustrated me because it was mostly her treating him badly (or just not giving a shit) and him being nice. Ella and Alice would have been a good dynamic but Alice was so unlikeable I didn't give a shit.

Back to Alice's entitlement. Almost every review has mentioned this, but I'm going to anyway: Finch is biracial (half white, half African-American) and there's a scene where Alice is driving, Finch is in the passenger seat and they have a confrontation with a police officer. Alice is being rude to the cop and afterwards Finch tells her how uncomfortable he was that she did that. Alice seems to understand why Finch would be uncomfortable but doesn't care. He calls her out for being privileged, which she throws back in his face because he's rich and she's poor so how could she be more privileged than him. And then it's never brought up again. Alice is never called out on it past this point, and never seems to care. The fact that she can't understand that in a racially charged confrontation she, a white woman, is more privileged than Finch, a black man, infuriated me to no end. Especially because Finch literally says "He could've dragged me out of the car because you were being an idiot. You think rich matters in this situation? You think a cop looks at me and sees rich? You're pretending you don't get it, but you do."

Okay, rant over. My final thing is the most minor of nitpicks but whatever. Early in the book they're in drama class and reading lines from The Glass Menagerie , which is a personal favourite play of mine, and Alice starts shitting on Laura. I get she's not a great character but it just rubbed me the wrong way for some reason?? Idk, told you it was minor.

Basically, this book had potential but fell really flat. I might pick up some of Melissa Albert's future books but I won't be picking up anything she writes that's part of this particular world.