Conner's Books & Reviews

Sometimes after wasting my time with a truly horrible book, I enjoy reading 1 star reviews for it on goodreads. So I was going over the reviews for this book and all I saw were positive ratings. In this situation I feel like you guys are wrong and so I needed to put up a review to set the record straight. It's probably the fault of all these 4 and 5 star reviews that I suffered through reading this book in the first place.

This book is just so bad. Poor writing, abysmal character development, dialogue straight out of a John Green fan-fiction written by an 11 year old... there is nothing positive I can say about it. The main character is so flat, boring, and one-dimensional that she isn't even a character; she has no personality beyond her exaggerated suicidality. She is a caricature of a depressed person. The male character written in here since every teen book has to have a love interest, is even worse. People like this absolutely do not exist. Our protagonist hardly says a word to him and only glares at him, but that doesn't stop him fulfilling his role for the book and following her around and magically being in love with her, and ultimately being there for her when she needs it. If this book was in any way meant to help someone that was depressed, the inclusion of this character is just baffling to me, considering most people won't have anyone like this; someone that cares and is understanding of their plight, especially not someone that will stay around when they consistently push them away. This is the character I was referring to when I made the John Green fan-fiction comment and you'll see what I mean if you make the grave mistake of reading this book; the difference is John Green is a good writer, and his dialogue is clever, whereas here it is mind-bendingly stupid. One comment the character made that I keep thinking about was when the protagonist didn't eat the crust of her pizza, the male character says something along the lines of "I don't like the crusts either, that means we're perfect for each other." I'm not sure in which universe that makes sense, as this just means nobody eats the pizza crusts and they get thrown away.

Every second I spent reading this was a complete waste of time, and it was honestly insulting to me, not because it was "depressing", but because of the way this book treated both its audience and mental illness. It's not going to teach you anything about understanding people who are depressed and want to take their lives. It's a cheap cash-in of popular titles about teen suicide, such as "Thirteen Reasons Why", which by the way was also a pretty bad book. If you're going to write realistic fiction about mental illness, you need to be able to write compassionately, and you need to understand your subject matter. This author takes the time to do neither.