Reviews

I have such a love-hate relationship with this book and I think I mostly hate it but I'm pretty sure that is too harsh. It was enjoyable as a teen novel but with the teen target audience comes the superficial angst. Honestly though? It was relatable. That doesn't mean it wasn't annoying. In fact, relating to something always seems to make it worse.
This book was about the severe effects of tumblr, hipster-on-hipster violence, film fans and the greatest form of suffering known to man: Year 12.
So, although it was difficult to decipher among the weird ranting, I believe the message of this book was that people tend to feel like nobody has ever felt the way they do, and they'll all express it in weird ways. Whether they express it or not, this kind of wallowing actually has a lot more effect than they think. Sitting around and isolating yourself is just as bad as joining a mob to feel important, so ultimately we just need healthy outlets and communication. This is a decent message, but it wasn't... communicated well enough.
I did quite like how it talked a lot about how you shouldn't reduce people in any way, be it to a memory, underestimating them, overestimating them, thinking they're perfect, thinking they're fake, any of these things can overlap, but you get the gist.
It seemed like the author just really wanted to have a book with issues in it. I don't think she understood the 300 mental illnesses she tried to give her characters, but it was a decent stab at it (well, not a very imposing one) that I'll let slide.
It was hard for me to tell how good the writing was because it was littered with pop culture references and just seemed so 'chronically online' as people say (lots of buzzwords and melodrama), but that was the point of the main character and it was also meant to talk about these things realistically. However, there was a part where the main character was told to stop worrying about realism in fiction, so I'm not sure if that last part was completely correct or if the author was just inconsistent. Another thing that prevented me from being able to tell whether the writing was good or not was that it kind of sounded like my inner monologue, just blown up to a ridiculous proportion. But I am kind of overdramatic so maybe it was just me. My thoughts on this book are just as messy as the narration, so that probably is true.
Sometimes this book reflected my life quite closely which set off a lot of disgust alarms and almost put me off it, but it was easy to read and entertaining enough so I continued and I think I'm glad I did. My favourite character was the love interest and I think that's only true because I think he reminds me a lot of one of my friends. Luckily for that friend, this isn't a love confession but a reason that I empathised with that character and found a lot more comfort in him than the author may have curated herself. It was also a very British book which I appreciate because it felt close to me, but again, sometimes relating to something makes it worse.
There was a plot twist that I guessed extremely early, but I think it made sense that I did as the main character concluded that she should've paid more attention to things.
As a final note, I didn't realise that by reading this book I'd be bamboozled into reading about the 'Heartstopper' characters. This book has led me to the conclusion that I will never read them, and that the famous Nick Nelson deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for picking up after literally everyone yet remaining pretty calm about it. I think I'd hate being him. God bless you, Nick Nelson.