nerdyprettythings's Reviews (515)

I NEED THE NEXT BOOK RIGHT NOW. I laughed, I squee’d, I cried omg I cried so hard, and I loved every bit of it. There's so much going on with the patriarchy and characters dealing with guilt, and the mystery around the enemy they're fighting. The main characters deal with mental health issues and physical disabilities. The MC is sent into the army basically as a sacrifice for her family to get money, and she acts so out of control, and she has this moment toward the end where she realizes she didn't value her own life at the time. I watched a YouTube video from the author, and they said they were suicidal at one point, and I feel like the way the main character is written you can really tell. There’s a scene where a male character explains that s*xual assault is never a victim’s fault and that men aren’t unable to control themselves, which I feel is a really important message in YA. I just appreciated so much about what this book did, and on top of that, it’s a KILLER story. I want so badly to be back in the book’s world reading more about what happens. 

I wish I had read this all in one sitting. There were several points that got really tense, and I think that would be more effective if I hadn’t mixed it in with a day running errands in the sunshine. 

I saw that it was a David Sedaris pick and that makes so much sense. For most of the book, there’s an undercurrent of weird humor. It takes a HARD turn at the end though, and I highly recommend checking the TWs.

This got very romance trope-y at the end, and I actually think there was a better setup for why things go wrong in the third act, but still, very cute and sexy. 

I would recommend going into this one thinking of it more as poetry than a novel. The plot is not really central, it’s more a series of reflections. Good writing, but it took a while to figure out what was going on or how many narrators there were, which made the first third or so of the book disorienting in a way that I don’t think was intended. 

So I think when I say I like books about motherhood I don’t mean about mothering babies…. This book just didn’t do it for me. I think it may have been really good as an unsettling short story, but even as a relatively short book, it felt tedious by the end.