Unfortunately the lack of absurdism made the one-liners hit a little less than the ones in Bianca Torre, but maybe that’s just my personal preference. While the characters were fun in their own right and had their own personalities and banter, they weren’t really fleshed out. I did, however, like the relationships Gigi had with her family, especially her mom. (Which, sidenote, a nonbinary mom!!! Yo!!! That’s gonna be me in the future if I have kids lmfao)

There were a couple of archetypes and plot similarities I thought could be drawn back to Justine Pucella Winans’s YA debut. Not as many as I thought—I guessed incorrectly who the killer was and it’s gotta be one of my worst bookish moments(seriously. All the clues were right there)—but still enough to make me raise a brow and wonder if JPW was starting to establish some tropes in their writing. I did like the (definitely on-purpose) Easter eggs, though!

And while this wasn’t a frequent problem, Gigi’s attitude to her attraction to boys kinda irked me, even though I’m not bisexual. I think this happened mostly in the beginning, but it made for some unintentional biphobia in the writing.

But as with JPW’s other YA novel, I enjoyed the snark, the terrible puns, and the main character herself. (I like how JPW writes teenage voices. It was interesting seeing their writing in the mind of a more closed-off and arrogant character, though.) MCs that are a bit of an asshole are usually the bane of my existence, but it turned out Gigi just had a strong set of morals and a reluctance to admit vulnerability. She still cared about the other characters in the main cast.

If you need to, though, take my review with a grain of salt. JPW is an auto-read author of mine and I had an unnaturally personal (and lasting) emotional attachment to her first YA thriller novel, so returning to that genre was comforting.