I won this book in a GoodReads Giveaway.
Where to start? This book sounded like a great YA lit book, and in many ways it was. It has the right elements: teenaged angst, a love triangle, gratuitous cursing, a coming out, and a prom. But honestly, this book is bad. I mean the story is fine: two best friends, having known each other since birth, struggle to navigate friendship and relationships as they have disparate interests and friend groups during their junior year; they have conflict, they sort of resolve their conflict, they grow as people, sort of.
Here is where I struggle with this book. First, the author comes very close to the two main characters growing as people, there are glimpses of Stella and Marie recognizing why they are struggle in their relationships, but they never quite get there; there’s almost and epiphany, but not quite. Secondly, and I’m not sure if the author isn’t a native English speaker or not, or she just had a really bad editor, but the grammar is terrible. The author switches between tenses (mixing present and past tense in the same sentence), she would often use the wrong form of the verb, and sometimes she would just use the wrong word altogether, for example, throughout the entire book she uses the word corporate when she meant cooperate. I’m not entirely unconvinced that this wasn’t written entirely by a bot.
If you don’t care about grammar or vocabulary, then this might be the book for you; otherwise, it’s really not worth the time; which is unfortunate, because the story has such promise.
L & L Shenanigans 