Beautiful, lyrical, stunning.

I wish I felt like I'd...somehow gotten a little more from this? It's a book with common themes of drug abuse and growing up queer and an immigrant, and it felt like a memoir even though it isn't. While I deeply enjoyed the poetic nature of it, it simultaneously felt somehow like a story I'd read before even though it was told in a new and excellent way.

I really wanted to love this book but there were a couple things that just didn’t work for me. Main characters Jack and Kate never really pulled me in and even at points irritated me to the point of not doing any reading for days, but Jack’s friends Jillian and Franny kept me going. There were a bunch of really good scenes, but there was also a lot of nothing that didn’t really interest me too much. It was also extremely self-aware, too much so in my opinion. I think it’s a sign that it took me almost a month to finally finish this book — Opposite of Always just wasn’t for me.

While the story was compelling, verse books have never really been my thing. I have trouble with how much shorter they are than prose books and I’m not a huge fan of poetry just generally. Still, definitely my favorite of the genre that I’ve read so far.

Grease, but make it good

I was a little torn going into this because it has a weird combination of things I like and things I don't. Retellings? Love em. Grease the musical? Keep it away from me. High school contemporaries? Sometimes, maybe, if you do it well.

Suffice it to say, I was pleasantly surprised by Only Mostly Devastated.

The story follows Ollie as he spends the summer in North Carolina with his family to be there for a terminally ill Aunt, and ends up staying there for the year. After their summer fling, Will ghosts him as soon as the two separate, but the two soon reconnect as Ollie starts senior year at a new school.

This book was a charming, quick read that left me absolutely satisfied. Gonzales took all of the parts of Grease that I hated and, in modernizing the story, smoothed them over and allowed me to enjoy myself. Ollie and Will's relationship isn't necessarily ~cute~ in the way you might expect from a contemporary romance, but it feels real, and the development of that relationship (and consequently of the two as people) was engaging and, of course, heartwarming in the end.

So much of Grease is about, obviously, these two messy, entangled friend groups, which I think Gonzales did pretty well. In sticking only with Ollie's perspective we focus significantly more on his friends rather than Will's which I did not mind one bit since all of Will's friends were pretty obnoxious. By focusing on just one friend group, though, those relationships and characters were explored more deeply, and I really enjoyed them. Lana, in particular, was probably my favorite character (although that's definitely just because I related to her the most).

All in all, Only Mostly Devastated succeeded in everything it set out to do. I was never frustrated or bored while reading, and in fact, rushed through a few aspects of my day today in order to finish it sooner.

ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley