ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

CWs: [drug use, alcohol, rape, assault, murder (hide spoiler)]

The premise had a lot of potential, but the book didn't manage to deliver on all of it, and that's mostly because the main character got in the way.

Toxic masculinity is the central theme of the story. The King's Cup is a competition between the male students where they score points based on their sexual prowess. Once Alyson, our main character, finds out about it, she starts the Queen's Cup as a way to get back at them. There's no point system, but the female students are officially part of the cup when they dump their boyfriends. We even get to see some of the elaborate dumping schemes, and those parts were fun to read about if you're in the mood for feminist revenge plots. But switching between that and Alyson being completely oblivious about her own boyfriend felt weird.

It wasn't too bad at first because I could buy into her being completely in love with him, and thus blind to his faults. But there is such a thing as too naïve, and Alyson soon hit that threshold for me. If she had been brought back to earth sooner, and had fully leaned into the Queen's Cup and turned the tables on Riggs, I think I would've enjoyed this a lot more. Regardless, it was entertaining enough, although I wouldn't necessarily describe it as "comic" in any shape or form.