nerdyprettythings's Reviews (515)

If somehow in 2021, while Jeff Bezos walks the earth, you don’t already hate the extremely wealthy, give this soap opera of a novel a read. 
I’m torn over how to rate this, because what I can say to really recommend it is that I wanted to finish it. I wanted to know what happened. However, what the fuck did I just read. Every woman is either a conniving bitch or a gullible dunce, and there’s no in between. At one point, a woman shows signs of having a personality and… she’s tricked into marriage and goes back to her gullible dunce ways. Most women in the book have a sexual assault story arc, and the ones who don’t are subjected to other horrible abuses. The only women with any personality are (obviously) the conniving bitches. There’s one character with hints that he’s gay, and he’s a violent rapist as a result of childhood trauma. 
One good takeaway from this book is that the wealthy shouldn’t be able to select from their own bloodlines to pass along all the world’s future wealth, and I think (?) that was sort of the moral of this story, which I did very much appreciate. I enjoyed it? I hated it? I actually wanted to throw it a few times? Sexual assault as a go-to plot point eventually ruined the book for me.

This was really smart satire, and had me saying “too real!” for most of the book. Gimme all the cults. 

I have a real problem with YA books that center on children who have to keep secrets, especially for adults. For the most part, this book was very cute, and I found the romance really believable, I was shipping Evie and X. But Evie’s parents make her keep her dad’s adultery a secret, and they let her be ridiculed by her sister for her emotional reaction to her father’s new relationship, and that never being resolved really rubbed me the wrong way. Evie grew a lot, but where was the responsibility out of the adults in her life? Also, really really wish we’d gotten more of the grandparents/dance studio owners. She was learning about love, and it would have been cute to have her interact with the one happy couple she knew.