Negative Eleventy-Billion Stars

Content warnings: Multiple miscarriages (one very graphically written about),

suicide, child death, cancer.

It's been several months since I read a book that made me want to throw it across the room. That is, until I picked up this book. I just don't get the heaps of praise this book is receiving. I thought it was an absolute disaster.

I don't even know where to begin with everything I hated about this book. My thoughts and feelings are so strong right now that I know I'm not going to be able to articulate this very well, but I'm going to try my best to keep my thoughts coherent.

First of all, the writing is long-winded and overdone. I'm sure some will say the same thing about this review, but I am not a professional writer with an editor whose sole job it is to make sure that doesn't happen. IOICTY is only 354 pages, but it felt much longer than that to me. There is hardly any dialogue in the book. It's mostly inner monologue, description, exposition, and flashbacks. SO MANY FLASHBACKS. There really isn't any white on any of the pages because they are all filled with melodramatic, flowery nonsense. The author often uses multiple words/phrases to describe something when one would suffice. The dialogue that is present feels clunky and not how people actually speak to one another. It's also inserted into strange and awkward spots. Phoebe and Audrey have a heart-to-heart about 'forever love' right before they are supposed to be going on stage to perform with their choir. Mia and Jess and Phoebe and Lily have really important conversations as they are arriving at the airport early one morning. Jess randomly sees Ben at her hotel in New York City (Because that's plausible. It's not like NYC is a city of 21 million people or anything) and he tells her his life story after she's been pretty damn rude and dismissive of him throughout the rest of the book.

The structure of the book also aggravated me.
The sections taking place in the 'current' timeline (2016, but close enough) are told in 3rd person past tense, while the flashbacks are in 3rd person present tense. Also, almost every flashback is structured in it's own chapter, except several in the beginning of the book which aren't, for no apparent reason.
Also, the sheer quantity of the flashbacks was ridiculous. Perhaps if the flashbacks had actually TOLD us anything, it would've been okay, but until

Lily and Jess's dad dies

on page 114, we get next to nothing concrete in these flashbacks. They are merely melodramatic filler that makes sense after you're done reading but while reading only succeed in making me roll my eyes 23842 times. Also, I'm not sure how the flashbacks could be so vague and at the same time so overwritten, but these were just that.
There are also a couple of scenes that are regurgitated multiple times through different POVs, and one scene that is told three times: once from Audrey, and twice from Lily's perspective. Because once isn't enough?

Before I get carried away and let you think that the writing was the only downfall of this book, let's talk about characters and plot, both of which share equal blame in making this book the failure it was for me.

So...I hate Jess. I hated her all throughout the book, and absolutely nothing that happened changed my mind. In fact, once I learned what the thing was that made Jess despise Lily for so long (it was what I thought it was...melodramatic bullshit) I hated her even more. I'm going to put some comments under a spoiler tag, but suffice it to say, the payoff of why Jess hated Lily was not at all worth the setup.

At first I thought that maybe their father had been sick and Lily helped him end his life. This was before we learned that Zoe was even a thing. After she was introduced, I thought that Lily perhaps did the same thing for Zoe, and it's obvious throughout the story that Jess believes that to be the case. It made no sense to me that she would hate her sister for that long, even if it were the case that Lily technically killed Zoe because she didn't want to see her sister in pain any longer. Then Jess says "if it hadn't been for Lily, her dad and Zoe would still be alive today." Um...nope. She had fucking lukemia. She was dying and it was obvious. So, they try to explain this away by saying that Audrey and Edward didn't tell Zoe or Jess that Zoe was coming home to die, so Jess assumed that she was getting better. This is such horse shit. First of all, Zoe and Jess were 10 years old. The author seems to think that a 10-year old wouldn't be able to see the fact that someone they love is in pain and not healthy and not getting better. As a woman with a 10-year old son, I can safely say that they are a lot more intuitive than you might think. And even if she wasn't at ten years old, to think that not once in the past 30 years had she taken a second and realized that her sister was dying, I just don't believe that. It doesn't make sense. It also doesn't make sense that her mother never talked about Zoe and her illness with Jess. Maybe she tried and Jess brushed it off like she did everything else she didn't want to listen to, but the lack of common sense among these three women just astounds me.

Jess was also a selfish hypocrite. Her mom's literal dying wish is for her daughter's to reconcile, but not only will Jess not even consider the request, but the threatens to cut her mother out of her life for bringing it up. But then later says she couldn't hurt her mother by telling her what Lily had (allegedly) done. She also has a petty reaction when finding out Lily's daughter is in choir with Audrey. "Her mum had been heading off to choir rehearsals twice a week for the past five weeks and had not seen fit to tell Jess that Phoebe was going with her." Ummm...why on Earth is that any of your business? And also, every time Audrey brought up Lily and Phoebe, Jess would act like a child sticking her fingers in her ears because she didn't want to acknowledge what her mother was saying.

I wasn't overly fond of Lily and Audrey either, but I didn't have the same vitriol for them that I feel for Jess as a character. She is the WORST.

I also wanted to say that I wish the story would've focused more on Phoebe and Mia and their relationship with each other and their mothers rather than this ridiculous 'secret'. None of their stories are resolved in any way. In fact, the end is rather rushed for how long it took to get to that point, and the final chapter is, again, full of melodrama and contrived to pull at your heartstrings. Apparently I'm cold-hearted, because I wasn't moved by this in the slightest.

Other Random things I disliked:
1. Lily thinks she is going to be laid off of her job as a marketing whiz. First of all, I'm supposed to believe that she is so successful that there are news/magazine articles being written about her, but her company is going to lay her off so they can move that part of their business to the U.S.? And also, the story ends without any sort of anything about this subplot. It serves literally zero purpose.

2. Phoebe comes out to her mom on the way to the airport and it's treated like a plot twist and a reason for conflict between mother and daughter. Phoebe gets angry that her mom is never around and didn't know that she was gay, but her grandmother, who we're supposed to believe is always taking care of Phoebe, didn't know either. She thought Phoebe had a crush on a boy they were in choir with. Also, they never have any sort of follow-up conversation, so again, a conversation that has no point being in this story. It would've been the same exact book with or without this scene.

3. The Ben and Jess relationship is given no real foundation. They have one real scene together and then when we skip forward at the end of the book they are together. Okay. Again, same book whether they are together or not.

Mostly, I just hate that I wasted my time with this book. I stuck with it because there are so many reviews gushing over it and saying it was so heart-breakingly beautiful and I just want to know what book they read, because I'd love to get my hands on it, but I can't believe it was this schmaltzy garbage.*


*I know I'm being harsh. I'm truly happy for anyone who enjoyed this book more than I did. I wish I'd liked it because, believe it or not, I don't like to read books I don't think I'm going to like. I especially don't like PAYING for books I don't think I'm going to like. Hopefully whoever ultimately ends up with this copy of this book loves it. It just won't be me.