2022: Heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy....

There's a line in the book about the main characters having won the "shit luck" lottery and by God, they did. This novel covers so many different issues that it was hard to imagine that any teenager could handle all of them. I was having a hard enough time, and I was just casually reading. There was also no escape; every time I tried to lose myself in the story, Tahir would throw in another "real life" element, such as rent being due, or needing to study for the SATs, or waiting to hear back from colleges, which just made it impossible to forget that she meant for these characters to live in the real world.

This is another book where you should really check the trigger warnings before jumping in. Overall, it's obviously a lovely choice when the author decides to add hotlines at the end of her novel, to make sure her readers can find support if they need it. But when I tell you that there is a CHAPTER of hotlines at the end of this book because there are SO MANY difficult topics that are covered in it! TOO MANY HOTLINES

Overall, the vibes were just overwhelmingly dismal. Like I know that I like sad books, but this one gets -1 for being just too much going on in one book. And I think there's a lot of privilege in that being my takeaway, the idea that this all would just be too much for some teens to handle. There's the fact of it being too much to handle while simultaneously being very similar to real life for a lot of first generation students in high schools nowadays. That being said, I think that [b:Firekeeper's Daughter|52346471|Firekeeper's Daughter|Angeline Boulley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1595093218l/52346471._SY75_.jpg|73690020] did a much better job of presenting difficult topics that are overwhelming teenagers.

Also I felt very old when the characters were looking for a song from "before they were born" and they picked SHIVER BY COLDPLAY :( otherwise, great references haha