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thesaltiestlibrarian's review
challenging
emotional
mysterious
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC. The opinions expressed herein are mine alone and may not reflect the views of the author, publisher, or distributor.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT follows Abby, her older sisters Jade and Blair, as they struggle through a blazing summer in their hometown of Moose Junction, Wisconsin. Blair has been sent to a rehabilitation facility following a mental break due slightly in part to her development of anorexia. She loves ballet. Abby, our narrator, loves astronomy. However, she feels like Earth is another planet with everything going on: her friends staying clear without reason, Jade suddenly being nice, Blair away at her rehab center, a famous astronomer renting a cabin on the property, and the public library being threatened with permanent closure.
Now that I write all that out, there's a lot going on in this book. That's not always a bad thing, but maybe it would have benefited the plot more to only have a couple major plots, with maybe two minor ones thrown in. While the characters were fine and a bit unremarkable, the structure worked against the quality in two distinct ways.
There were too many "b" plots.
Abby is looking for something for the famous astronomer, and there's cabin work to be done on the cabin he and his assistant are staying in, and Abby's friends are avoiding her, and Blair is suffering an eating disorder, and she's in rehab that's almost draining the family's money, and the library is closing, AND we go back in time to see Blair's downward slope, AND...!
Too much. Yeah, I get that life throws a lot at people, and I've been there too. But the thing about fiction is that it needs to be believable, if not solely for the fact that life is too big to think about sometimes in the first place.
The timeline skips detracted from the present.
We didn't really need to see Blair's slide into darkness. We know that it happened when we come into the novel. A lot more tension could have been brought if Swinarski had kept us in the present and built from that. Flipping us into the past, into things we already got a feel for in the "now," made me less inclined to keep reading.
While I enjoyed the story for what it was, there were pretty obvious flaws that kept it from being a *fantastic* read for me.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT follows Abby, her older sisters Jade and Blair, as they struggle through a blazing summer in their hometown of Moose Junction, Wisconsin. Blair has been sent to a rehabilitation facility following a mental break due slightly in part to her development of anorexia. She loves ballet. Abby, our narrator, loves astronomy. However, she feels like Earth is another planet with everything going on: her friends staying clear without reason, Jade suddenly being nice, Blair away at her rehab center, a famous astronomer renting a cabin on the property, and the public library being threatened with permanent closure.
Now that I write all that out, there's a lot going on in this book. That's not always a bad thing, but maybe it would have benefited the plot more to only have a couple major plots, with maybe two minor ones thrown in. While the characters were fine and a bit unremarkable, the structure worked against the quality in two distinct ways.
There were too many "b" plots.
Abby is looking for something for the famous astronomer, and there's cabin work to be done on the cabin he and his assistant are staying in, and Abby's friends are avoiding her, and Blair is suffering an eating disorder, and she's in rehab that's almost draining the family's money, and the library is closing, AND we go back in time to see Blair's downward slope, AND...!
Too much. Yeah, I get that life throws a lot at people, and I've been there too. But the thing about fiction is that it needs to be believable, if not solely for the fact that life is too big to think about sometimes in the first place.
The timeline skips detracted from the present.
We didn't really need to see Blair's slide into darkness. We know that it happened when we come into the novel. A lot more tension could have been brought if Swinarski had kept us in the present and built from that. Flipping us into the past, into things we already got a feel for in the "now," made me less inclined to keep reading.
While I enjoyed the story for what it was, there were pretty obvious flaws that kept it from being a *fantastic* read for me.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Eating disorder
Minor: Death and Panic attacks/disorders
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