(Won through a Goodreads giveaway! Thank you to author B.K. Dell for providing me a free e-copy.)

I think I kind of knew from the beginning — Shane’s opening chapter had me rolling my eyes at its overt ominous tone, his contemplation of how worthless his classmates’ lives were, his contempt for Life in general — then enter Keisha, an angel (in Shane’s eyes at least), who is about to be drawn into a predictably unhealthy relationship with this bad boy despite her constant flashbacks to her friend’s warning that he’s a psychopath. (Seriously, they throw around the word “psychopath” a few times, never pausing to examine its impact on mental health stigma or individual reputations.) He’s obsessive, though arguably she’s the stalker, and it’s just toxic all around — there’s even a scene where Keisha is resentful that Shane respected her earlier “no” and now won’t take advantage of her, and an outright condemnation of #MeToo for “enfeebling” our men when instead we could be teaching them to read our signals.

Honestly, I didn’t like Keisha much. Her fixation on “saving” Shane and his future six victims, playing God because she thinks it worked once before; her “quirky-cute”/doesn’t-know-she’s-beautiful/“the pretty giirls always win and that doesn’t include me” thing, the insensitive jokes that lead to her feelings getting hurt when Shane doesn’t find them funny (because they’re not). She performs page-long monologues on the meaning of love and being our best selves, usually to Shane, and just doesn’t seem to have much going on besides her general positive attitude mixed with a slight underdog complex. Come to think of it, I’m not sure this book passes the Bechdel test.

My biggest problem is perhaps that everything felt like a plot device, especially because there was little follow-up — for example,

Spoiler

after Shane poisoned Aubrey so Keisha could star in the school play

— unless it played into the main plot. Even Keisha’s storyline revolves around Shane; once she gets entangled, she doesn’t seem to think about or spend time with anyone or anything else, including her love for acting and her only friend, Molly. The high school setting and its inhabitants are not just cliched but drawn out, from the explicit archetypes (jock, cheerleader, loner, etc) to the long explanation of how to play Never Have I Ever. The end twist seemed to come out of nowhere, which I didn’t like; nor did I like the sharp turn into HEA afterward.

There’s even an in-class debate about the Second Amendment, which was definitely a heavy-handed touch, especially considering both sides stuck to the same few talking points that we’re all already familiar with: people kill people, guns are part of the culture of the South (which was never revisited outside the context of the debate, which seems to defeat the purpose of setting the book in the South), at least we can make it harder for potential school shooters to execute their plans.

Overall, I just felt like this book tried too hard to be too many things, and ultimately didn’t do very well at any of them.