FOREVER FOR A YEAR was quite the trip. I will say that I have a bad habit of disliking books about teenagers who act overly like teenagers (i.e. making very dumb choices), but that's my only caveat here. What goes on in this book speeds way past that threshold.

Because whYYYYYYYY in the name of all that is holy did Gottfred decide to use internet-speak for the ENTIRE NOVEL. I understand preserving dialects. I do. I enjoy it, but what the heck. This book is just one long tumblr post, and yeah, that's fine if they were actually speaking over the internet, but this is everyday thought speech. This is every sentence. This is the author trying way too hard to make their book "relatable" to the target audience. Teenagers do not speak internet 24/7. They speak internet on the internet.

So the voice was a major stumbling block for me. Then the plot was rather bland. You know, it was typical heterosexual high school stuff. Gay side-characters were there for 2.5 pages, race was mentioned at the beginning, and class issues held out a little. The parents and their parental conflicts were so similar I had trouble distinguishing among them. I thought it was great that the author had such a frank discussion of sex, contraceptives, spicing up relationships etc: that's really valuable for teens to learn. I thought it was neat that Trevor was the more mature one instead of the typical selfish-guy-and-responsible-girl dynamic. Overall, however, nothing new or original happened.

I don't know. A bland heteros-forever story. I would recommend to either people who have never watched a high school drama TV show so all this is new to them, or to teens looking for a friendly way to learn about safe sex and first relationships.