2.5 stars.

This was majorly, epically fine. 70% of the book is spent just meandering about, then there’s some lead up and we go straight into the final climax, which is … pretty good. But I needed more of that end in the rest of the book. Sure, there’s a few bits of foreshadowing but it’s not enough. There’s so many things that could have been done here to make this a truly dark gothic horror or thriller and the author passed by almost all of them.

Whatever you’re excited for this book to be, there’s a different book that does it better.

I have complicated feelings about this. On one hand, I really enjoyed Jay’s narrative. I thought he was really funny and I had no trouble at all blasting right through this. I also really liked that in all the drama that there is, none of it is homophobic. Everyone just accepts queerness. To unrealistic levels, perhaps. But it’s nice to read this kind of story now and again.

Now, the bad (but also kind of … the good? Like I said, it’s complicated). There are some pretty shitty things done here - both done to Jay and done by Jay. And all of them are forgiven and seemingly forgotten. Not that I don’t think people deserve to be forgiven for these things - they do. I know that as a teenager, I lied and gaslighted and manipulated people for my own selfish purposes until I figured out that the people I cared for deserved better than that and that my actions were those of a pretty shitty human. But people in this book are forgiven too easily, I think, and in some cases, with no acknowledgement how dangerous and toxic the offending party’s actions really were. I really needed some acknowledgment of the ways lying/gaslighting/manipulating can irrevocably change and even destroy relationships, but that didn’t happen. Everyone’s relationship goes back to how it had been before, and all the lying/manipulating/etc is just water under a bridge.

So in the end, I enjoyed it. Would I recommend it? I have no idea.