Was really hyped for this one, but this ain't it. This was actually one of the 2020 releases I was quite excited for, but unfortunately it just didn't live up to the hope I had for it.

In my opinion, this book didn't work on so many levels.

1. The Characters: I've rarely read an ensemble cast where I've literally hated every single character. From the start, I was put off by the single POV in a book with such a large main cast (though this does make sense in the end). These types of thrillers heavily rely on a reader's connection to the characters, as it is the desire for their favorite to not die (or for a despired character to die) that makes these books so 'thrilling'. You lose a lot of potential connection by limiting the POV to just a single character. On top of that, all of the characters were insanely tropey, and they never really move beyond that. It's like each character was assigned a trait or two, and that's all they get. The star athlete's personality is minimized to only caring about sports, the music geek (the main character) only cares about getting into her dream music school, and the loner is defined solely by the fact that she's always alone, even in a group. They never grow or move beyond these initial tropes, and it only makes harder for the reader to connect with them. You can't connect with just a shallow concept. Lastly, they all just sucked?? Like in not the way that morally grey characters are mildly evil, but you love them anyways. These guys just all sucked to varying degrees and I just, didn't enjoy that at all.

2. The Past vs. Present Storytelling: I normally like when stories play with formatting and aren't just told in a linear manner, but this just is not the way to do it. The two halves of the story are entirely unbalanced, with the Past getting a lot more page time (due to the insane amount of random drama that needs to be explained to understand the Present), and it leads to any tension that may have built up in the meager Present chapters (where they're literally deciding who to kill) to dissipate almost instantly. It makes for an extremely boring thriller, and I honestly wasn't on my seat for any of it until the end, where we get a few Present chapters strung together. On top of that, the Past chapters just sucked? Like, all we get is a bunch of high school drama thrown together (bullying! drinking! drugs! kids with guns! romance trouble! serial killers!) and it's all way too much and tropey, just like the characters. It felt unrealistic and thrown together just to make the plot twist make sense.

3. The Plot Twist: I can't really discuss this fully here without spoiling the entire book, but honestly this was a let down for quite a few reasons. First, it didn't seem to fit the characters, especially the main character, at all. Second, it basically killed the growth/importance of the events in the Past, since they're rendered irrelevant due to the results of the plot twist. And third, it honestly was quite a disappointment overall. The twist itself was wholly uninteresting, even if some of the consequences of it were wild (and not necessarily in a good way).

Overall, I wish I loved this, but I honestly didn't at all.