Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.
I finally finished this book, after the almost 2.5 months it took to read it. I have been reflecting as to what about it made it so hard for me to finish (as I can finish many books in a day or two), and so much about this book had appealed to me. It has alternating perspectives between the two main characters (which I love), it has a grumpy-sunshine trope (kinda), it has people defying expectations and breaking free of what is expected of them to find a place where they feel they belong. The one knock in the blurb, that I knew from the get-go was going to be a bummer for me, was the “secret that could destroy them” trope, cause I hate when an entire relationship implodes when they could have just talked to each other and it would have been fine. But these things aside, I still found myself struggling to pick up, let alone finish, this book.
I am not sure if I know the answer. This could be one of those books that I like on paper (in blurb form) and just not as much in reality. I can only really think of one thing that sticks out as being a major issue for me, and that’s the fact that Cooper’s temper and impulsivity made me want to smack him. Like I get it, you trust no one and nothing, but also, if you maybe spent five minutes talking to literally any other human in the world, some (definitely not all – looking at you Shelley) of your problems would be solved. All of the other things in this book were just feelings I had that made it hard for me to continue reading. I am not giving up on this author or even other books from this set, as the characters were varied, but this was not what I was expecting it to be.