teeny
Generally quite sweet young adult book with interesting themes around death and loss.
Another one with a weird age gap relationship between a teen girl and an adult man that goes entirely unexamined, though, which I am definitely not a fan of. The reverse ageing plot point seems to brush it under the rug, like the older man looks like a 17 year old boy therefore it's fine, but they still have their memories and the totality of their experience in their heads, so how is it not creepy for someone in their mid 30s experience-wise to be interested in a straight up teen girl? It's even mentioned at one point that while they're 9 and 11 in elsewhere, they would have been 22 and 41 on earth. But then they also do seem to regress into actual childlike mental states when they're little kids, so I don't really get it. Like their maturity level reverses as their age does, but they keep all their memories, and what is maturity if not the collective learning you gain by experience?
The concept just ended up a bit muddled, for me, but maybe I'm just thinking about it too much. As a young adult novel (which I have to say, I don't usually read) it examined the themes well enough.
Flew through this book in two sittings (would have been one if sleep wasn't unfortunately necessary at 6am)
I don't have a lot to add to the other positive reviews, the things I liked about the book are well covered. Based on the more negative or lukewarm reviews, I think the main sticking point is what you want to get out of the book. I don't really consume true crime content, and I picked this up because in general I mostly read books focused on women's perspectives. I suspect that many of the people who did not enjoy this book so much were fairly familiar with the case going in, and I can see why a blend of true crime and fiction would be offputting or lack tension in that context, but I didn't have that issue.
I think if you're looking for a traditional thriller, this probably is not a book for you, because it is not that. But if you enjoy books focused on women, their perspectives and inner lives, the ways in which male violence and incompetence affects them, etc, then you will get a lot out of this book.
I liked the idea of this book, but the execution just felt a bit shallow? It's titled parasocial and supposedly about obsession but we barely see any evidence of either of those things. The only interactions between the narrator and the focus of her “obsession” that we see are a couple of short IM back and forths. We're told rather than shown.
Would have been much more enjoyable, for me, if it was a longer book with more of a slow burn build up demonstrating the growing obsession before the confrontation and the one-two punch of “oh she's a catfish” followed by “ohhhh she's a psychopathic witch.”
The horror bits were very fun though, I enjoyed the second half of the book a lot more than the first.
I found this book very readable, I enjoyed it and it didn't drag at all. The concept was interesting, and ofc I'm gonna pick up anything that can be described as a gender swapped lord of the flies.
The main issue that I did have here was the love story. In a book that's making a clear point about patriarchal brutality, it didn't seem a little bit strange to include a cutesy romance between a literal 16 year old and an adult man whose entire job is to hunt teenage girls to sell their body parts? Even without his job role, he's a grown man and she's a child, and that is not remotely examined or painted as anything other than romantic. I found it incredibly jarring in a book that is fairly explicitly ABOUT misogyny. When he died I was glad about it, which didn't seem like the author's intention. I'd have preferred a sapphic romance or no romance at all.
I also wish the other girls had been given more characterisation, only one really was to any degree. The main character is very Not Like Other Girls, and I don't feel like we really saw her develop beyond that through the book, with just a quick turnaround in the last few pages.
Overall enjoyable read but not really doing what it set out to, IMO.