-Some minor SPOILERS ahead. I say minor because these things occur at the very beginning of the book.

Trigger Warnings:
Suicidal thoughts, self-harm, bullying.

I listened to this on audiobook. I had no idea what this book was about. I remember it being mentioned before on YouTube, but couldn't remember anything about it and didn't read a synopsis before turning it on.

I'm honestly not sure exactly what I feel about this book. I wavered between 3 and 4 stars.

What I liked:
1. The musical aspect of this book. Elise is a withdrawn, bullied girl who hides from the world and escapes into her headphones. At first, her complete dismissal of anything modern (like top-40) felt a little pretentious. At the same time, I loved the DJ stuff and Char's lessons teaching her how to create a set.

2. The message about bullying. I was never bullied to the extent that I didn't have friends (actually, I count myself lucky that I am still great friends with the friends I had in high school.) but there were definitely aspects of this that hit home for me. It felt personal, and it felt authentic. Oh, and kids can be huge assholes.

3. The secret night club, Start. I wanna go!


What I was iffy on:

1. Elise. Now, hear me out. I didn't *hate* Elise. And to be fair, this may have more to do with the audiobook than the actual text of the book. But, since I experienced this story through audio, I am critiquing it thusly. The story is told through Elise's perspective. And she is very candid in the way she imparts this story to the reader. When she makes the decision at the beginning of the book to commit suicide, it is said in a very flippant way. She says, "I decided to kill myself." in the same way someone might say, "I decided to make spaghetti for dinner." It's a little strange. Now, I understand that this is a girl who is depressed. She borders on obsessive in her quest to be accepted by her shitty peers. But we don't get any sense of that in the text or the narrator's tone. I could also understand if she just sounded resigned to her fate, like she'd just given up. But she doesn't, or at least, the narration doesn't.
Also, she wasn't exactly a likable character. As much as I sympathized with her, I felt angry with her as well, especially with what she did to her younger sister. Now, I get that she's doing it out of some misguided sense of wanting to protect her sister from the same bullying she'd endured, but in reality she became a bully in that moment.
Also, for someone who was so desperate for attention that she cut herself to get it, she spends the majority of the book judging everyone around her.

2. The relationship with Elise and Char. I didn't like him through the entire book, and I felt like her 'hooking up' (still not quite sure what that meant. Did they have sex? I couldn't tell if we were supposed to assume they did or didn't.) with him after him telling her that he slept with Pippa because "she's hot" shows how truly desperate she really was for any kind of positive attention. Now, even though I put this in the list of things I wasn't fond of, that doesn't actually mean it made the book worse for me. In reality it felt completely authentic. When a person has no self-esteem they will gravitate toward any shred of light they can find. And unfortunately, there are other people who like to take advantage of low self-esteem. They seek it out and exploit it, which is exactly what Char did. I kind of wish the author had kept them just friends, because I liked the scenes where he taught her how to DJ, but this was authentic.

3. I wish we'd gotten more of her recovery process. They went from suicidal to DJ in no time and I would've preferred if they'd focused more on her initial recovery.

4. Speaking of DJs, the idea that she would become an amazing, sought-after, genius of a DJ after a month or two was ridiculous. And how can someone so socially awkward 'read a room' like she claims? That part did not feel authentic to me at all.


All in all, I liked this book, but I wish that the tone in the audiobook had matched the intensity of the subject matter and wish the main character's development had been a little tighter.