I sort of feel awful rating this so low but it just felt like such a mess, which is so disappointing because I was so excited for it. The pacing and time jumps of the book felt confusing, the relationship between Khaki and Fiona was supposed to feel obsessive and connected but I didn't get that at all. I was so excited for the band/song references but that didn't feel cohesive either. I also am uncertain as to why the references to the Scooby schools existed, as that is a direct reference to the Five College Consortium but they were in California. I wanted to like this so much but it felt fragmented and honestly I was on the verge of DNFing it for most of the book.

Brittle and hard, like ice. Soft and bruised. Loud and intense but extremely internal even claustrophobic. Destructive in a real misery loves company way. 

The synopsis is a fking lie ok we need to start there, the original sin. This is not a story about toxic friendship or whatever tf it said, this is a story about girls wanting to disappear so achingly badly. They choose their hiding methods: anorexia and bulimia ofc, to minimize their surface area and control the chances of being perceived; each other, to know someone else so deeply that they have an escape from the misery of their own minds, to have someone to blame, someone else to pour into so they don't have to think about how empty they are; music (or movies) that they can fixate on in a way that allows them to become nothing more than a vessel, a body that only hears, only shoves, only perceives but is never individualized, is the masses. Either way, you never have to be yourself. Your only friend , who knows you so completely, still can't escape her own head long enough to think about you or consider you and maybe that's what drew you to her. 

I'm so torn, this was really beautiful writing but she used it to write the most godawful internal monologue ever written. A gutting exploration of mental illness - particularly depression, anxiety, OCD, and heavy heavy heavy eating disorder content. Like 80% of the book is just about one or both character's anorexia. And like no content warnings at all? Not even a mention of ED in the synopsis? When it was like literally 75% of the book? The synopsis fking lied to me. And it's 2024 put some fking content warnings in this book. 

Anyways. Like I said I'm torn. it was an honest exploration but god it was dark. I understand that whatever healing we're supposed to think went on was just barely enough  for them to hang on to life and that's real, and ED is a chronic illness and it's not magically cured at 30 and people still struggling with it do choose to do things like adopt a child... from Africa? But it just felt like fking raking myself across the coals towards the end there being inside a brain starving itself for 10 years.  And like I love a character study, I do, but what is the point of this story? To spend 300 pages in the passenger seat of a car being repeatedly driven nearly off a cliff? To glorify or humanize or honor or honestly  profit off of anorexia...  what is this book doing? What is it saying? No fr someone tell me.  

If you feel like DNFing at 30%, 40%, DO IT. SAVE YOURSELF while you still can. Nothing changes. Or it gets worse. I didn't highlight a word past page 69. I guess I'm not torn if my thoughts are that the last 250 pages aren't worth reading. 

I think this book was maybe just not for me. It was the type of literary fiction where the character is so inside her own head that it gets grating and hard to read. Maybe that was the point, and if it was, then like I said, I think this book just wasn't for me because I don't enjoy that sort of thing. Most of the issues I found with this were that the characters were so insufferable and obsessed with their own suffering, particularly Khaki and Fiona. The book often put me in a bad mood just reading it because the stewing in one's own suffering and punishing oneself for nothing was just hard to read about. I understand what the book was trying to do, but phew, it was not fun or interesting to read. It felt less like it was making a point and more like it was just a deep dive into the brain of someone who has a lot of issues and isn't resolving to get help for any of them. Also this book needs so many trigger warnings so I'd really recommend looking into that before reading.