A review by frogqueen
Barely Missing Everything by Matt Mendez

emotional hopeful sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

  • slice of life about two teenage boys living in el paso, dreaming of making it out and becoming a filmmaker and a basketball player respectively, getting dragged down by reality
  • up to the last 50 pages, it felt like nothing much happened. this was frustrating while reading, but in hindsight i think it was a good decision to show the intricacies of teenage life this way
  • a good reflection of how we go about our mundane lives, trying to chip away at our goals, sabotaging ourselves and convincing ourselves we aren't, knowing in the back of our minds that it can all come crashing down at any moment
  • the ending, while heartbreaking, was really, really good- the different layers of dramatic irony and the implications this has for each of the characters, the hope that comes out of destruction.
  • aside from the pace, my main complaint is that i had a hard time telling what year this was supposed to be- the details of armando's crime, which happened about 18 years before the events of the book, were written on a typewriter and then later scanned in because they didn't use computers to do such things at that time, and yet google, youtube, tumblr, and BITCOIN (!?) are all mentioned in such a way that suggests they are all reasonably well known and within the public consciousness. so to me the earliest this could be is around 2015, but you mean to tell me prisons were still using typewriters for records in the late 90s?
  • also fabi still has a flip phone, which, ok, she doesn't have a lot of money, but by the late 2010s there were widely available cheap smartphones, so this also felt off
  • i also think maybe this book could have benefited from being a bit longer. i felt like i didn't get to know any of the characters well enough to really understand them