This is a really fun read, and yeah, it almost is like you're reading Virgin Suicides fan fac, but there are equal parts Lovely Bones and even, in the more class influenced parts, bits of Secret History in here. It's like someone took all of the most successful middlebrow books of the last decade and whipped them up in a blender. Like all blender drinks, this one goes down smooth, maybe smoother than the originals. The question remains how valid a criterion smoothness is in terms of literary value, and that kind of haunts this book-- I did finish it and feel good about having read it, and now, well, nothing.

I honestly did find the classism of the book kind of strange-- we encounter a whole range of possible outcomes here, but those that are suffered by characters a little outside the upper middle class core of the book, like Trey and Hatchet, feel more serious than those felt by the others. I'm not sure what I think about that, except to say it felt deliberate, but in a way that was shorthand for something aside from some blind class prejudice on Pittard's part- like it's fate, not her who is to blame.