Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.
This was a wild rollercoaster for me – and as I am sitting at the end of it I am not sure what my final thoughts are quite yet. Was it enjoyable? Sure. Did also make me upset? Yep. Like any good rollercoaster (in my mind) there is a level of hating some aspect of the experience but loving the thrill overall; this is one of those books, where I enjoyed the ride it took me on but man did some of the experience make me uncomfortable. I kept going back in forth with deciding if I loved this book or hated what I was reading, which was a strange experience.
There was a lot I really enjoyed about this book: Jewish identity discussion, relationship between Zoe and her best friend Hannah, unwavering support of being a free spirit and working for the goals that you want, etc. Things that made it a little hard for me to read were things like the societal pressures of marriage playing out in the way Zoe interacted with Rylan (trying to not give spoilers), and just some of the actual personality traits of the main characters. The problem with reading books about humans when it is written realistically, is that humans can be trash people and it is realistic to write them as such. I appreciated a lot of the quips in this book, and up until about 5 pages before the ending I was quite concerned about how the book would end – but I am very happy with how things worked out (they worked out how I hoped they would so I am biased). Maybe people will hate the ending, but I liked it a lot, and there is definitely a lot of big picture conversations in this book that I will need to sit with for a while. 3.5/5