Truthfully the author won me over when she woke up and Willem was gone. Of course the college sections didn't hurt, though I'm not too sure about her tracking him down.

Running away with best friend + road trip + misadventures = never a dull moment in this sweet and exciting tale. Finding out that

Spoiler

everyone has cancer

broke my heart; character deaths almost always get to me.

I've read this, but apparently the author didn't actually research autism when writing his autistic main character. That's not okay.

The style takes some getting used to, and there's a pretty long in-between period where I found it hard to relate to Francie. Lee, I disliked from the start. Little plot development, but I did really enjoy the parallel beginning and ending.

The voice/style better suited the narrator's age than in Closed Doors. That said, Abilene is far from one of my favorite MC's. Though I loved Jinx, I thought it was pretty obvious who he was. The ending dragged but the reveals were pretty abrupt.

Honestly I'm a little disappointed that the story was all about their communications and separate summers preceding their actual freshman year, i.e. roommate experience. A bit corny, especially at the end, but a pretty fun read nonetheless.

In theory, I probably should've liked this book a lot more than I actually did. The plot was fascinating and I definitely related to Cinder, but I guess the narrative itself wasn't very compelling. The writing style didn't strongly appeal to me and the developments didn't really excite me.

A fairly standard middle-grade novel, in terms of plot, twists, wording, character development.

Spoiler

The betrayal

was predictable. I know I'm not part of the target demographic for this book, but I was still pretty disappointed.