Young Adult Fiction
Delacorte Press
2017
Hardcover
288
Told through flashbacks, best friends Jule and Imogen are orphaned outcasts who will do almost anything to attain a happy, wealthy life.
WrensReads Review:
I have waited for about two months to write this review. I am dreading being honest in this review because I really enjoy the author and her banters with Libba Bray.
She really seemed to grasp the need for creepier and darker things for messed-up-in-the-head people like me and I was really excited to read this with my book club, The Cheerful Wednesdays. We all were actually, because we all loved her and wanted to see some of her brain-children.
But, sadly… I did not enjoy this book.
So the book was told from the cliffhanger-second-to-last-chapter and works its way forward to chapter one. So you know where the main character Jules is in the beginning, which is in an extravagant and lavish hotel closer/over the border, but you don’t know how she got there. So you go back one chapter at a time to where the story began, which is where she meets her best friend, Imogen. Then the whole book ends with the actual last chapter and not the beginning chapter (Makes sense? Probably not).
The whole book is about how she got to where she is, what happened to one of the girls and all the people she met on the way. There are some toxic friendships and just some people that are a little nutty.
But… there was no character development because of the way the story was told. All the characters, which none of them likable, stayed very stagnant and didn’t grow or get worse. They were all just really bad people to begin with and not in the enjoyable way.
And I was literally confused the whole time. I honestly don’t know if everything happened to Jules or if it happened to Imogen or if for some reason it all happened to a random lady named Grace who wasn’t even in this book and I just randomly thought up that name to put it in there because HEY IT COULD HAVE ALL BEEN GRACE.
I am all for mysteries and keeping things hidden until they are needed to create a big story-change or have a big reveal, but when I close the book and I still don’t know what is going on or I don’t even 100% know who the main character is, I only get really frustrated.
I didn’t enjoy this book, though I really enjoy the author as a person. I am glad that other people did enjoy the book though, because I really, truly wanted to too.
WrensReads | Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram
Leave a Reply