jessicadann01 's review for:

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

2.5

emotional inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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This book fell a bit flat for me in a lot of areas. I nearly DNFd it about halfway through. I felt like for the first ~300 pages the story hadn’t moved enough and I really didn’t feel invested in the characters or care what happened to them. The last 100 pages then felt very rushed and I don’t really feel satisfied that everything was tied up neatly. I did appreciate the diversity with it being set in the 1950s and based on an Asian American family. I found it interesting to read about that. Although I felt like there were too many themes and subplots that a lot of them ended up feeling half done. It sort of felt like heartstopper to me in that I appreciate its existence for LQBGTQIA representation for young people but it just wasn’t really up my street tbh.