I received an ARC from Sourcebooks Fire through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I’m struggling with my feelings about this book because my main opinion about it is that it isn’t bad, I may have even liked it at a different point in time, but that publishing it now, especially as new variants of COVID-19 rage across the world, rubs me the wrong way. Other people will probably have no issue reading this book, but I thought I was going to be fine reading it and instead it was hitting on things that were just too raw and real for me to be able to enjoy this book.
For me, this pandemic has not ended, so having it fictionalized and having this book directly pull from the way that this pandemic has been reacted to was just rough. I had really enjoyed the previous works of this author that I have read but I majorly struggled with this one. I just kept thinking that I probably would have enjoyed this book if it were published five years down the line when everything isn’t so raw and continuously ongoing.
I enjoyed the character development throughout the novel and thought that the little epistolary elements to break up the chapters were a nice touch. The relationships between the teens were constantly in flux as they reacted to the stressors which felt very real. I didn’t like as much that each character seemed to have their one defining trait and that one trait made up most of their personality. If there were not as many narrators and each character seemed to have one trait, I would chalk it up to how that narrator views others, but even the POV characters feel like they each have one main distinctive trait.