Somebody needs to get this entire family in THERAPY. Oh my god!

Ahem. Anyway.

Oh Marisol, my angry, grieving teen self. There were quite a few times I winced from recognizing my past self in this screaming teenager. The fraught mother-daughter dynamic of an Americanized teen and her immigrant mother is relatable. And then to lose her so suddenly?? Yeah, I’d say this depiction of a confused and angry girl is pretty spot on. This book is one messy knot of FEELINGS, but most especially grief. 

There are just too many things that kept disrupting my enjoyment of this book that I couldn’t overlook.
The first being that I started this on audiobook and while the narrator’s voice for Marisol was fine (really nailed the teen angst), I was constantly taken out of the book when she voiced any of the male characters??? Idk, it just didn’t work for me. Then there were several moments of dialogue that just felt so stilted and forced. I can’t recall all the examples, but I’m still chuckling over a parent addressing her kid as “eldest child” seriously.

This book is all played out through a young girl’s mind, so the internal dialogue reads a lot like my teenage diary entries. Rambling and a bit repetitious. The amount of times I’d read the same verb stacked up as triplets was obnoxious. Some examples I can recall from the top of my mind:
“…drive and drive and drive…”
“…walk and walk and walk…”
“…sleep and sleep and sleep…”

Combine this with pacing that feels all over the place thanks to the constant time jumps and flashbacks, and I was a bit underwhelmed. I think this book has something to say, it just gets lost via lackluster writing and stilted dialogue.