Even though almost review I had come across of this novel was not favorable, I was still hopeful enough to give it a try. That proved to be a mistake, because the only reason I finished this book was that by the time I finally realized I wasn't liking it, I had read so much of it that I figured I might as well finish it, even if it was just for the petty satisfaction of giving it a low rating. Anything I was liking or liked at some point about the story was not able to outweigh all the negatives. To name a few criticisms: the plot was not engaging, the characters were uninteresting and didn't feel fleshed out (it felt like the author was making them do them for the sake of moving the plot forward instead of it feeling authentic to the characters' personalities and motivations), and all the characters that I read as being coded as people of color were either the villain or made to suffer for the sake of the white characters' development.