This book is pretty bad, ya’ll. Like not very good at all. It suffers from a lot of issues. One, the world created within it is so poorly rendered it seems but overwhelming and fake. So there’s pretty much nothing in this book that has anything connecting it to the wider world. It’s all PLOT PLOT PLOT PLOT and nothing else, which CAN be fine but just doesn’t work here because she TRYING so hard to make this richer and real. There’s a historical context subplot that adds nothing. There’s a fake feminist feel to this novel that reads like a teenager reading about feminism and then creating male characters within this framework.
At point I literally said aloud “Oh go fuck yourself”: don’t make your hot teacher who hooks up with the teen be teaching Lolita. It’s bullshit and you know it.
Here’s some things I thought reading this novel, if I was supposed to exclaim in response to the revelations of this novel:
*Hot teachers can be creeps even if they’re hot.
*Sometimes old women are fat and ugly but they still have value!
*Magic might be real but it’s not really real.
*Some girls have small boobs and some girls have big boobs but they can still be friends.
This novel is NOT Gone Girl and that’s not even a perfect novel, but what it does is let the characters set the agenda. This novel fake forces us to deal with sketchy narration to allow the plot to unfold, and she cowardly does not let the would-be suspects hide in their own narration. Gone Girl at least has the characters fuck with us as readers. This one basically says, I can’t do it, so here’s some third person narration on the male suspects even though every other chapter is narrated by a character. It’s boring, it’s insulting, and it’s not good.