lyderature 's review for:

Tonight the Streets Are Ours by Leila Sales

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This highlighted some very important truths about the relationships we form with people in our lives. We judge them, love them, hurt them, save them, leave them - and throughout all of this, we're trying to grin and bear it. But the message here is not an uplifting one.

We make promises we can't keep. We act as though our hands are bounds and fates set in stone. We complain about what we have to do and then do it and complain. We play the self-pity game with ourselves, again and again, feeding ourselves our pain. We love to play the victim. We love to play the hero. We cling to our fantasies that'll never come true. We over-romanticize, oversimplify, over-sympathize until the people around us have been reduced to archetypes and nothing more. We're can be unpleasant creatures. We hope for greatness and instead live a life of mediocrity. We hurt.

And reading this hurt, because the ideas here hit just a little too close to home. The characters were easy to dislike but far too easy to relate to. There was a lot of substance but little resolution. Lots of problems, few solutions. Just acceptance and ambiguity in the end, which is both okay and not okay.

I'm just left with this feeling of discontent.