But what initially starts as a harmless competition between friends leads Zae on a downward spiral as family, academic, friend, and guy drama come to a head. Soon she is forced to face the reasons behind her boy hatred, and starts to wonder if she wasn’t wrong about the male race…or at least some of them. (Pub Date: Dec 18, 2018)
Honest review based on an ARC provided by Edelweiss. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.
I was looking forward to this fun story, but I felt disappointed.
But for the many important themes carefully approached, I think it was still worth it.
Zae has been facing problems in all aspects of her life, her parents constantly fighting, her boyfriend cheating, even the cheerleaders tryouts may become a flunk this year. She has no idea what to do with herself when she decides to take control of things, starting with boys. That's when she and her friends start a competition to see whom will kiss the most boys before they're back to school.
I was ready for something more like Firsts, which had a similar premise although it wasn't a competition there. But what really lacked here was fun. Zae was at a mental state I could only feel pity for her. Things were too serious in this book for me to have fun and all I could do was wait for her breakdown. As you can see, I have myself to blame for wanting a different kind of book and thus feeling frustrated.
Despite dragging, the book managed to approach many important and some not so common themes, such as not wanting to go to a university. To be honest, I don't remember reading any YA's on this, and it's always important to show kids they have so many more options than what conventions impose.
Of course there was much more that would render good discussions for a group reading, so this is surely a recommended book for book clubs and the such. On this, I wish they had approached the idea of girls kissing for fun in a positive way, though. As I said, Zae wasn't in the best place to make decisions, which didn't help this argument. It's a pity, since the author seemed to give serious thought to everything she was proposing, so it'd have been an important situation.
In all, this was just a book that dragged. The plethora of characters, especially boys, coming and going didn't help my getting involved since I couldn't even keep count of the important characters. But I'd still read more from this writer, you can see she has a lot of talent and great ideas.
Rating: 3 out of 5.
No comments:
Post a Comment