“Icarus approaching the sun. Touching it. How good it felt. The light. The warmth. How could she not want to bask in it forever?”

Been trying to figure out how to review this because my thoughts are terribly conflicted.

The first half of this book kind of felt like watching a very heavy DCOM, complete with enough deception and terrible decisions to kill a man. The second half read more like a romcom? with unnecessary conflict? This created a story that felt really disjointed. There were times things felt too slow and others too fast, times where the humor felt really insensitive or out of place, and a whole lot of conveniences that were hard to ignore.

Moving on from that, I did appreciate following Mika as a main character. She is complex, flawed, and makes the worst decisions I have ever had the misfortune of witnessing, but she is also impossible not to sympathize with - at least a bit.

A lot of this book revolves around identity, particularly all of the different aspects of identity and how it affects every decision Mika makes. From being the only child in a Japanese immigrant family to simply her identity as a woman, every single expectation put on her has created the decisions she's made and left her completely unmoored in her thirties. She's used to completely recreating herself for others and this has led to the fact deception is her initial response.

I appreciated these conversations and the nuanced look it took at her situations and the journey she was on. Honestly, I would have preferred if the book had focused solely on her finding herself and slowly shedding the expectations of others.

However, that wasn't the case. Don't get me wrong, we do get that - to a certain level - but it takes a sideline to every other topic this book wanted to deal with. Which might not have bothered me if I'd liked the other two characters, but Penny and Thomas were horrible and I was relieved to finish the book so I could be free of them.

Already... a romance between

the bio mom and the adoptive, widower father

is kind of an uncomfortable dynamic from the get-go, but Thomas made everything so much worse. He was so creepy and rude that by the time we saw the other side of him, it just felt like a manipulation to make the reader root for their romance.

And Penny... don't get me started on her.

So. There were a lot of things I think this book did really well and I really enjoyed/appreciated, but there was also a lot that could have been handled better.

I'm glad I read it, but it's not one I'd necessarily recommend.