This book is okay. It's fine, really. Reading it was a decent way to while away my lunch breaks at work. However, the essays never went as deeply as I wanted them to, never gained much detail past generalizations, and while the anecdotes were interesting, I thought that they could have been more polished and less... expected. This book is new, and it feels new, and a bit too grounded in the 2018 social media zeitgeist for my taste.

I was born in 1988, so I missed the original Jem and the Holograms and therefore can't speak to how this reboot compares. I picked it up because I had heard generally positive things and because I have a weakness for cute stuff. There was quite a bit of cute stuff here, including adorable and inclusive character designs. But the plot felt flat to me. I never really cared much about what was happening, and after finishing, I didn't feel curious or eager to read more.

Suspense set in a high school, detailing a mysterious epidemic with friendly nods to The Crucible. It felt slow until suddenly it wasn’t, and I’ll be reading more Megan Abbott.

Not perfect (some distracting elements, including the use of dialect), but damn is this a stirring and compelling book.

Supremely pleasurable escapism, with characters I want to get to know better. I didn’t think of myself as the kind of reader to appreciate “gentle” reads, but I guess it can’t be all sabotage and murder and nihilism all the time, can it?

Honestly, reading this book reminded me of the way I read during summer when I was a kid, unheeding of wider opinion and caring only for a good story (usually one checked out of the adult section of the library). The kind of reading where the words sort of disappear and the characters start to feel like real people. Reading that leaves you dreamy and restless with a longing to go to a place that never existed, or to a time that no longer does.

Whereas Taylor could have succumbed to mindless nostalgia, there is in this book an implicit awareness that some things improve over time (especially in regards to medical interventions) and that not all was rosy in the past. There have always been heartbreaking losses and drunk husbands and petty people with too much money and power. Looking back, the reader knows that violence looms over the characters, though they don’t know it, themselves: It’s the mid-1960s in Northern Ireland, and there remain but a handful of years before the Troubles.

But Taylor imbues his writing with humor and with a faith in the goodness of most people and in the ability for things to work out in the end that in my fouler moods I might find obnoxiously naïve, but which today I find charming and heartening.