EDIT: I’ve heard that Alice has made some changes to this book to make it less problematic and I haven’t read this newer version yet. My thoughts were solely based on the first published one! I’m so glad Alice adds warnings and made some necessary edits, I will read the changed version once I get a new copy!

I've heard that Solitaire isn't Alice Oseman's best book and I was well aware of that going into it. I still wanted to read this because I've loved Alice's other books a lot and I was interested to see the writing development. I'm just going to write some thoughts down because I wish I knew some of these things before picking the book up...

First of all there are trigger/content warnings for suicide attempts/suicidal thoughts/eating disorder/fire/self-harm/depression? (this is not clearly stated but it's sort of hinted towards depression I suppose ).

It's clear that Tori is a very pessimist and I was interested to read from her perspective. I get that some people might relate to someone like Tori and her thought process but there are some things I really hated reading about, like her describing how she wished she had a gun to shoot people and how things made her want to commit suicide and slit her wrists like?? Is this supposed to be a representation of depression?? Isn't that extremely harmful?? Especially because it went on and on throughout the entire book...
It also bothered me how she talked about Charlie self harming and attempting suicide like it was normal. I get that this book is about her not Charlie but those are serious topics to talk about. When talking about mental health you have to be careful and you can't just throw words around because this could be really harmful to people reading it.

Tori also kept calling people "mental" and "crazy". Again HOW can a book supposedly about mental health throw around words that could potentially be harmful?? I understand it's all part of Tori's character but it was never addressed besides the fact that she falls in love with the person she thought was "mental" like is that supposed to make it right?? I honestly don't know what the point was of making her say such rude and problematic things if it wasn't to address them eventually.

Other comments that bothered me a lot were "he sounds like an 8 year old girl" and "but you were so normal" what does that even mean??? She kept using "Im a bad person" as an excuse for literally everything and ended up not even having that much character development... She just fell in love and suddenly decided she would change? Or wouldn't change?? I honestly still don't get where this book was trying to go...

The tagline of this book is "this is not a love story" it kinda is though...
It would be an entirely different story if this book was actually centred around mental health and Tori having those thoughts and also dealing with her brother going through a lot. But none of that was really addressed. Or not in a good way at least. It honestly felt like a really harmful and problematic mental health representation since these serious topics were handled like they were just "normal teenage things".

I don't know if I made any sense basically this book just confused me a lot. I'm glad I like Alice's Oseman's newer books because this really wasn't it for me.