Every day

We all want everything to be okay. We don't even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.

I enjoyed this book, but there is a fatphobic chapter that was so harsh that it took my breath away. Also, A is kind of a stalker.

Not a fan. It's been a while since I've read YA, so I'm not sure if this is objectively juvenile writing or if it fits neatly into the genre, but I'm inclined to think the former; after all, I've read and enjoyed (if not loved)plenty of YA in the past, or books at that reading level, from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games to John Green teen romances. This book feels...flat. The plot is flat and anti-climactic. The dialogue is flat. Scenes are flat. The characters are especially flat (seriously, he fell in love with Rhiannon after a few hours? Rhiannon is boring AF and WAY too trusting of strangers. Which means A fell in love with her physical appearance, mostly, which is antithetical to THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE BOOK).

Oh, and the premise is wholly implausible. I don't like having to accept this absolutely bonkers premise in a world that is supposedly ours (vs. fantasy world, dystopian, etc). Especially because the “rules” of said premise are so artificially imposed, making it harder to buy in. And for a book like this to work, the reader HAS to buy in.

I'll give it this: the premise does drum up some interesting questions about identity. How tied is our identity to our bodies, and our circumstances? What truly makes a person a person? And how might these questions affect our experience of romantic love?

Also, it does force us to explore what it is like to be in someone else's shoes, quite literally; so I also appreciate the exercise in empathy.

But mostly I appreciate that it only took me a few hours to read because on the whole I thought it was dumb.