This is such a difficult book to review. There were so many things in this book that I thought really worked. However, there were quite a few things that weren't as successful.

TW: suicide, self-harm, anxiety, mental instability (I think they specifically referenced schizophrenia, but I'm not 100% sure about that.)

What I liked:

1. Friendships. I loved Louis's relationship with his sister Willa. I also enjoyed the dynamic between Arrow and Frances. The friendship between Louis and Frances was great in the beginning as well.

2. Quirkiness. The story itself is quirky. Frances and Louis have had a tendency since their childhoods to lose things -- or more specifically, to have things leave them. Many of the characters are quirky. Parts of this book have a dream-like or fairy-tale quality to them. As a person who likes a little quirk with her stories, I appreciated that.

3. Road trips. I like books that incorporate road trips. This book had two. I wish more time had been spent on the road trip aspect.

4. Quick read. The book is about 330 pages, and I read it in two short sittings. I wanted to know what was going to happen next, and my curiosity kept me engaged throughout the majority of this story.

What I didn't like:

1. Lack of common sense. So the whole idea behind Frances going on this road trip is ridiculous.

She receives a bunch of letters from her mentally unstable mother. Her mother is obviously not in her right mind in these letters, yet she just takes what her mother says at face value and decides to go across the country to confront a movie star to see if he's her biological father. It makes no sense that this would be the first step that she would take. The man she's believed to be her paternal grandfather is her direct caregiver. How difficult would it have been to do a DNA test to see if there was a familial connection between them? That is a rhetorical question. The answer is: not difficult at all. Then they could've taken that information and gone on from there.

I'm not saying that she wouldn't have gone on the road trip at all, but it felt like there was a pretty major step skipped that should've been addressed.

2. Lack of believability. I'm not referring to the hook of this story, which is that both Frances and Louis tend to 'lose' things in a way that seems almost magical. I don't mind a little magical realism. Actually, I really like it. But there are so many more moments in this book that force the reader to suspend disbelief to a point that I just couldn't anymore.

a. Randomly meeting someone whose father was old friends with the movie star she's looking for who gives her the contact information for said movie star.
b. The movie star being gay and just offering up that information with no hesitance. I'm only saying this isn't believable because it's obvious from the other characters' reactions that this isn't publicly-known information, which would lead me to assume that he isn't publicly out. Why would a well-known celebrity, who isn't out in his public life, tell a random girl who showed up on his doorstep that he is gay? It just doesn't track for me.
c. The movie star just happens to have an identical twin brother who no one knows about. That just doesn't make sense.

3. Last third of the book. After Louis and Frances finally meet, I felt like the book went downhill for me. It was just so rushed. We hardly got to see them actually interact with one another. They meet up, decide to take a walk, then the book jumps to the next day and just kind of touches on what happened the night before. This happens twice. We also don't get to see Louis's tour of the university. And he goes from not being sure that he really wants to go to that school to treating it like a done deal with no actual progression. It's just automatic.
Willa's story is left completely open. I'm not sure if the author wrote a book about her or not, but I didn't like how there was no resolution on her story.
And the very end, where

Frances's birth father finds her was so ridiculous. The dialogue was cheesy, the entire premise was completely unbelievable, and the writing was just not satisfying. It was so rushed that it left me no time whatsoever to have any real emotion about it. I get that there is supposed to be a fate or destiny sort of feeling around this story, but I wasn't buying it.

4. Lack of connection. At the end of the day, I just didn't connect at all with the characters. As I said, I liked the quirkiness of many of the side characters. But I just didn't find Louis and Frances very compelling. They had dealt with some truly terrible things in their lives, but I never once felt a tug at my heartstrings. I never once got choked up. I never found myself grinning or laughing out loud. As readable as this was, I never had any heightened emotion while reading this book. And there are some heavy topics covered in this books. Topics that would usually affect me emotionally. I'm not sure where the disconnect was.

All in all, I can see an audience for this book, but I just didn't connect to it like I would've liked. I would read another book from this author, especially if there is a continuation of Willa's story, because as I said, her story was unresolved and I think that she's probably my favorite character in the book.