2.5. This took me a long time to finish mostly because I didn't care about Sam. And found a lot of the plot to be kinda dull?? It's also maybe one plot line and a hundred pages too long.

Riri Williams is a sweet summer child and I would kill for her

I have a lot of thoughts on this book. It's gonna take some time to sort them all out. It was good but like... super weird?? Idk man.

I think at this point it's safe to say that I don't care for Schwab's works. It's nothing to do with her and yet everything to do with her. I don't find her stories interesting or her characters sympathetic. Her world ideas are great but just don't come together. I can, however, understand what draws people to her worlds. Which is why this is getting a three and not a two. I get that there are aspects of this book that YA readers wet themselves over. But they do nothing whatsoever for me.

Y'all I CANNOT! I appreciate that I'm not the target audience for this (I'm a girl, but not a teenager or straight) and I can see how little college freshman me would have been ALL over this. But adult me can't see past all the glaring things I can't stand about this book. I love poetry but I found myself spending all of this book either going "gross" or "why are straight people like this?"

What to say about this train wreck? It reads like something that might have been funny fifteen years or so ago when this kind of TV show was all the rage. As it is this reads in such a moving way towards teens that i, a fully grown adult, find myself offended. I was hoping for something in the way of kill the boy band but instead I got what feels like a fake TV series Daria and Jane might have watched.