Reviews

Solitaire by Alice Oseman

Only show reviews with written explanations

binabolina's review against another edition

3.0

So.

I don’t usually review books, but I decided I would for Solitare when I was rereading it.

This is a book that when I first read it, I thought I would never reread it because I disliked it so much. Somehow, I still dislike it but for exactly all the opposite reasons.

The reason I ended up rereading Solitaire was because of my recent re-ignition of my obsession of Heartstopper, with the Netflix adaptation. I think this is true for most people, either discovering or re-discovering Oseman’s works.

The first and most important thing to know going into Solitaire if you’ve only watched/read Heartstopper, is that it is nothing like Heartstopper in any way, shape, or form. Where Heartstopper is wholesome, sensitive when dealing with sensitive issues, and relatable, Solitaire is pessimistic, insensitive and callous, and completely batshit. If you are interested in this book only because of Nick and Charlie, know that they act wildly out of character, and are in very few scenes anyway. I only have the original publication, so I can't say how the 2020 edited edition differs, but if I can get my hands on it I will add an update to my review.

If you are a fan of Heartstopper because it made you feel happy, don’t read Solitaire. It's very depressing, and extremely triggering. Here are the content warnings copied from Alice Oseman’s website:

References to suicide and suicide attempts
Suicidal ideation
Self-harm
Depression
Eating disorders
Obsessive-compulsive behaviours
Narrator has implied undiagnosed depression
Brief incidents of homophobia
Unchallenged misogyny and ableism

But what is Solitaire actually about? Well.

There are two ways to describe Solitaire. The first is the one you are likely to find on the back cover, or an Amazon description. Solitaire is about a teen girl named Victoria Spring, who attends an all-girls grammar school. Post-winter holidays, Tori is back in school for the new term, when someone calling themself “Solitaire” starts pulling obnoxious pranks around school. As the pranks escalate and become more dangerous, Tori decides Solitaire needs to be stopped before someone gets hurt, and she's the only one that can do it.

This is a very misleading description. What Solitaire is actually about, is an almost train-of-thought, unreliable look at Tori’s degrading mental health, as she starts in a horribly apathetic place, and continues to worsen. It is about her pushing away her best friend Becky, and her old friend Lucas, as she continues to spiral. It is about Michael Holden trying to become friends with her, despite her trying to push him away too.

The main issue with Solitaire is that Troi does not care about Solitaire for about 60% of the book, and when she finally does, all the answers fall into her lap. She never investigates. She is always conveniently in the right place at the right time. There is no mystery. My second issue is I don’t care about Solitaire. At first, the pranks are fine, somewhat believable, however even the simple ones go on for so long without anyone getting caught that my suspension of disbelief begins to strain. Then they cross the line of “I don't think hacking works like that” to “I don't think that's scientifically possible.” They don’t feel grounded in reality, and they distract from the parts I do care about.

Now, this is the biggest difference from the first time I read this book. When I read Solitaire back in 2017, I hated Tori. She is unlikeable, needlessly mean to people, callous, and very, very depressed. On rereading, it would be inaccurate to say I like Tori. She’s still not a very good person. But she’s an incredibly interesting character. I feel like stories with unreliable narrators are not ones you often see in YA, which I suppose is understandable. Young people have a hard time not taking what they are told at face value. (I know this is a generalisation. I’m not saying a teen couldn’t understand, but, like, I couldn’t.)

Tori’s narration, and even the way characters speak to one another, feels very liminal. There are times when they say things no real human would. Everything feels foggy. Several times, Tori and Michael snap at each other seemingly out of nowhere. People tell Tori things about herself she can’t remember. I feel like this is a very accurate portrayal of depression, however it also makes the book very hard to read and understand at times. This is probably why I didn’t like Tori the first time through, and the only thing I could remember about Solitaire was that I didn’t like her. (I didn’t even remember Lucas existed as a character, which is telling of you’ve read the book.)

I like that she is drifting away from Becky, but the issue with them is we are always told they used to be best friends, and we never see it. I know this is a result of Tori’s unreliableness, but for me it doesn't quite work because there are no stakes in her losing Becky. She remembers the objective fact that they were best friends, but she can’t remember why. At different times in the book, they both accuse the other of being the one who changed, not maliciously or angrily, but both of them think the reason their friendship is falling apart is because of the other one. This is very, very subtle and easily missed. I like this part of their dynamic, however I wonder how many people notice, as I think it's very important for their characterization.

And then there’s Michael Holden. I feel very conflicted about him. I like the version of him that exists in my head. I’m not sure if I like the one that exists in the book. It’s not because of any fault of his, but the way he’s written. He feels very “manic pixie dream girl.” Oseman tried to address this in the book, I think, by acknowledging it. I think the intention was that although he is manic, he does not exist to save Tori. This is also something that I don’t think was very well done. Michael says he doesn’t exist to save Tori, but he kind of does. He’s always there, conveniently, right when she needs him.

Lucas doesn't get a paragraph because I don't like him or his character. You could cut him out of the story and it would be better for it. As Tori’s “friend,” he is redundant,

Spoiler

and as we established I don’t care for the Solitaire pranks.

Finally, there’s the melodramatic ending, where I don’t really know what's going on half the time, and the other half what's going on is pretty ridiculous. This is where the book loses its footing in reality, because while the rest of the book (besides the Solitaire parts) feel fairly real, if somewhat liminal because of Tori’s mental state, the end is full-blown action movie nonsense, unrealistic to the nth degree.

Warning for suicide mention, but if you have no desire to read the book, what happens is:

Spoiler

Tori goes to the school to find out what Solitaire’s final prank is and to try to stop it, and it turns out they want to burn down the school. It conveniently blows up, the implication being the fire spread to the science classroom and lit unstable/explosive chemicals. Micheal is also there, for some reason that is never explained, and he and Tori are in the school when it explodes. (There are also other people here, but they have already left the school.) Tori assumes he is dead, and runs up to the roof, the implication being she intends to jump off the roof in a suicide attempt. Then, for some reason, Charlie is there, yelling to her from the ground don’t. And then Nick is there. And then a bunch of random students Tori doesn't know are there. And actually, Micheal isn’t dead, and he finds Tori somehow, and they have an extended conversation about how they both hate themselves, on the roof, while the school is still on fire, and hundreds of kids are watching. (Micheal shows Tori his phone, while they are on the roof of the school that is on fire, that Lucas made a facebook post that Solitaire was burning down the school. The implication being kids would be on facebook at 6 in the morning.) Michaels and Tori also kiss, and I think they are still on the roof of the school that is burning but it is never said how they get down. And the part I understand the least is, everybody is happy the school is burning down. It is framed in the story as a good thing.

The only thing I could think of, for the author to have ended the book like this, is because they were still in school themself at the time of writing, and didn't have the insight to see how this doesn’t solve anyone’s problem. It wasn't the school that was causing peoples problems, it was themselves, and to a lesser extent, eachother, and sometimes, as Tori herself says in the book, “Shit happens.”

One of the few things I do like about the ending is that Tori is explicitly not better. She is still severely depressed and is contemplating if she still wants to be alive. But she also explicitly has people who care about her, and will stick by her, even when it's not easy. I like that internally Tori forgives Becky, and it's not clear whether they will remain friends or not.

I also think it's funny that this book is blurbed as being “Catcher and the Rye for the digital era,” and one of the characters makes the quip “Can any teenager be sad and, like, not compared to that book?”

I …feel weird about Charlie. He doesn't really have an arc in this book, but a lot of very traumatic things happen to him that don't get acknowledged in Heartstopper. I don’t think they should be, but the more Heartstopper explores Charlie's past trauma without acknowledging this the more it feels like Solitaire just isn’t canon to the Heartstopper universe. Frankly speaking, I don’t think it should be.

This may be an unpopular opinion, I genuinely don’t know, but if there is a future for the Heartstopper adaptation, I hope Solitaire is not adapted. The best parts of Tori’s story are the parts not involving Solitaire. My ideal version of her story is it being rewritten to fit the tone of the show more, and incorporated in as a minor subplot. There are a lot of extraneous parts, and having her story stretched out over multiple seasons would be very interesting. Even if Oseman didn’t want to change the tone or incorporate it into Heartstopper, I think they should revisit Tori’s story should an adaptation ever be under consideration, and not feel the need to stick anywhere near to what they’ve already written. Even just the amount of growth as an author they went through from this book to Radio Silence (one of my top 5 favourite novels of all time), they could very easily create something that more successfully accomplishes what they intended when they first wrote Solitaire.