Fun, mostly worked for me. Stevie is weird and my favourite part of the book. The narrative works to reinforce her neuroatypical thought processes and quirks. Coupled with the overarching plot, the first half of the book is pretty fantastic. It cuts from Stevie going to the new school to the past when the murder she wants to solve as a sort of dissertation for the school. It clips along nicely.

Ironically, when a major subplot within her wheelhouse is introduced it gets a bit derailed and meandering. Stevie is likeable enough to me that I stuck with it, but it definitely ramps up the readers need to suspend disbelief and give the book some latitude to work with. Then the ending is pure setup for the second book, which I really hate. The subplot thread isn’t really fully resolved and then it drops a couple twists a leaves.

I’ll continue with it because my library has the audiobooks, which, btw, are fantastically narrated. I saw a review that said they didn’t like it because it’s a woman narrating and her male voices were bad but it’s really dependent on the reader and people are always polarized one way or the other. For me, I can’t stand men trying to narrate feminine voices, and find women can do masculine tones much better. It’s all a matter of taste on that front. You can tell the narrator is experienced because every character has their own mannerisms and inflection, which is hard to do. I thought it was fantastic. Pretty sure she won an award for it too so