Trigger warnings: Depression, suicide and suicidal thoughts, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.

I am still trying to process what I just read. I will say this: THIS IS NOT A ROMANCE. I have seen several reviews calling this an 'exquisite love story' and NO. NO, this is not a romance. This book has zero healthy relationships within it, with the possible exception of Connell and his mother. Both of the protagonists have serious issues that remain largely un-addressed throughout the course of this book, and they are even more toxic together than they are when they are apart.

I found this book highly disturbing, which I think is the goal? At least, I HOPE that was the author's intention. I hope I'm not supposed to root for these people and their 'relationship'. What I really wanted was for Marianne to seek counseling and love herself, because she is a mess.

Not only was the content of this book difficult to read, but the structure of the book also made it unnecessarily confusing. There are no quotation marks used for the dialogue in this book, and there are huge paragraphs full of dialogue involving multiple characters, instead of giving each side of the conversation its own paragraph. I've read books in the past that didn't use quote marks on dialogue, but it was far easier to discern who was speaking because of the structure of the actual paragraphs. I would be really interested to know what the author's reasoning was behind this decision.

Another issue I had was the fact that I felt very distant from these characters and their story. I think this is for a variety of reasons. First, the story is told in third person, and it is a very distant third person at that. It's almost as if we are being told a story about two people we don't know by an acquaintance we also don't know very well. And while this isn't something I complain about a lot, this book was all tell, no show. Every chapter went something like this:

1. Jump ahead weeks or months following the previous chapter.
2. Set the scene with our characters in a completely different spot than they were at the end
of the last chapter.
3. Jump back in between the ending of the last chapter and the beginning of the current
chapter to fill the reader in on everything that happened.
It was repetitive and monotonous. This book is only 270ish pages long, but I honestly felt like about 50 pages could've been cut from this and almost nothing would have changed.

None of the secondary characters are well-developed. Marianne's brother and mother were one-dimensional villains. We're never given any sort of motive for their behavior toward Marianne, and it just seemed very unrealistic.

For the first half to two-thirds of this book, I thought it was going to get a decent rating from me. I was intrigued by these damaged, flawed characters and wanted to know more. I wanted to see them learn and grow and love themselves. But that never happens. They seem to me to be the same people they are at the end of the book that they are at the beginning. I also don't like the open-ended nature of the ending. I didn't need it to end totally wrapped up in a happily-ever-after bow, but there is zero resolution to anything, and it made me wonder what the point of the book was.

I know that people who love this book will probably love all of the things that I hated, and that's okay. I personally found the writing, characters, and 'plot' to be pretentious and dull. But I know that I am in the minority on that one, as this book seems to be getting all sorts of critical and reader acclaim.

This is only the second Book of the Month book that I've received that I haven't enjoyed. The best thing going for it was that it was less than 300 pages. I don't see myself picking up anything else from this author. I just don't think she's for me.