There will be spoilers in this review.

Like most other readers, I love books about books so the idea of communicating and revisiting the past through mailed books snagged my interest. However, that didn’t hold up well in the long run since the reason they were sent ended up not being as mysterious as otherwise set up. I’m not sure what I was expecting from this book but what I got wasn’t it. I never like recapping a book in my reviews, so I’ll just jump right into it.

First, let me say that I did enjoy the back and forth in the narrative. This helped to draw out the anticipation as to what happened to make Robin run away and come back. It was also a nice way of unfolding her parent’s crimes which lead Robin to live with her grandmother. I also enjoyed the exchange of books and poems and the remembrances Robin shared of those. I will say those aspects were beautifully done.

However there wasn't much past that to make me really enjoy this book and that was in large part due to the cast. The only likeable characters were Dawt Pi, Dave, and Ryan. That’s about it. Everyone else was some brand of terrible. Even the grandmother wasn’t very likeable, which feels bad considering what happened to her. I realized halfway through I wasn’t enjoying a majority of these characters I wanted to see how it all ended, what the big betrayal was, and I had used one of my Hoopla credits to renew it. So I kept on.

When the attack on the grandmother happened in the past is what turned it for me since that came out of nowhere and, at the time, seemed thrown in for shock value. We were left guessing as to why but didn’t really figure it out until the end. This is related to another twist I had trouble with; the introduction of Billy. This happened at almost 60% through the novel and brought up yet another twist that it was Robin’s mother, Lindy, who did the killing. Then to only turn out to find out that Billy was the ‘real’ bad guy who did the killings and that he came looking for the letters that would incriminate him and attacked the grandma. None of which really came to fruition until almost the very end.

All of these seemed thrown in simply to keep us guessing, while trying to keep up the literary theme that it started out with. I get that was put in likely due to trying to get into Robin’s mindset, but that close to the end it seemed thrown in as a last ditch effort to make is go, "What a twist!!"
The reunion with Peter was just too neat. After just leaving town with no explanation and so many decades I expected more conflict. If you ignore me for two months, let alone two decades, and then show up suddenly, I'm not going to be the one reaching out to you. Then, there was a brief moment where Robin said she felt herself drawing back because he turned her poems in because ‘He didn’t have the right’, which made me want to throw my phone. That was quickly disposed off but even the fact that the thought was entertained to make this drag on longer had me groaning.
There are some books that can straddle multiple genres well but, for me, this was not one of them. I'm not even sure what genre it can be put in. It felt like the author had all these different ideas they wanted for a story and tried to cram it all into one. The synopsis would leave us to think it was a romance, but then other reviews have likened it to Christian fiction. I am going to take a stand and say that it is not because mentioning God in passing or as an aside for the majority of the tale does not a Christian book make. Overall I feel like this book had big ambitions and ended up falling short of the potential that it had.