I had a hard time giving this book less than three stars, in part because I really like author Sierra Elmore (from what I've seen on Twitter; I don't know her personally) and she's done a lot of good mental health advocacy. However, as someone with the same mental conditions as the main character who has struggled with them for much longer, I take issue with a lot of how living with depression is represented in this book.

It would be doing this book a disservice not to talk about its many excellent aspects, so I'll start there. Firstly, I loved that main character Carter is a bisexual Black girl—and one who excels in and loves STEM, no less! It was also great that the main cast was all queer minus the token straight girl—there were enough queer characters that even the antagonist(s) could be queer. I liked how complex the antagonists were, and giving one of them an equal MC POV was a bold choice that turned out working well. It allowed insight into how people can be good in many regards (the main antagonist is committed to supporting Black people; another is head of the GSA) yet this doesn't redeem their other harmful actions.

Another excellent theme was the way adults, particularly school faculty, are unhelpful a lot of the time in situations where students are mentally ill and/or are being bullied. There's a really great passage: "He's one of the 'cool' teachers, the one who lets students get away with things we shouldn't in order to score popular points with the kind of girls he never had a chance with in high school," that I think most people who've gone to high school have experienced. All the girls' parents are also present in the story, and they run the gamut from Carter's mom (fiercely supportive but deliberately kept out of the loop by her daughter) to Abby's parents (divorced, often-absent Catholic Republicans Abby notes are racist). Basically, I liked how the narrative acknowledged how much influence adults have over teenagers' lives, even if the teens won't always admit it.

Now on to my major issue: how mental illness was treated (and it was the main theme of the book). Carter has severe chronic treatment-resistant depression and spends a great deal of her time actively suicidal. She attempts suicide about halfway through the book. And then, oddly, everything magically gets better for her. She finds a psychiatrist who works for her, she is prescribed meds that make most of her depressive symptoms fade, and other students who tormented her mercilessly will suddenly give her the time of day. In short, the book's framing makes attempting suicide seem like the answer to all life's problems. Further, Carter says/thinks things that indicate the author thinks depression is something from which one can recover completely. It's not, and any psychiatrist or therapist will tell their patients that meds and therapy can help manage symptoms, but they're never going to completely go away. In my personal experience, meds often become less effective over time and you have to try something else, which may or may not work. I think it's actively harmful that Carter's psychiatrist never challenges how Carter perceives this as it may give readers the wrong impression.

I also had a less major issue with how a number of the antagonists got redemption arcs. These are people who bullied someone to the point of her attempting suicide, yet the bullied person tolerates and even befriends them afterward. The parents of the antagonist-MC who she mentioned were racist? She grows closer with them over the course of the book despite no mention being made of them doing antiracist learning/work. The MC basically gives the antagonist MC a pass for all her bad behavior because it turns out they both have trauma—that's not how life works. Basically, I think there need to be consequences for that kind of thing and it felt disingenuous for the story to gloss over the consequences of people doing harm to others, often those with more marginalizations than them.

I wish I hadn't read this book. I don't know if I want others to read it. If so, I rec it with reservations and a recommendation to look at the content warnings first. I was severely triggered by the on-page suicide attempt and self-harm, so I hate to think how a depressed teenager (this book's presumed target audience) would react. The depressed MC also punches down/sideways at folks with "scary" mental illnesses, acting upset to be assumed one of them. As a person with depression whose parent has a scary mental illness, I'm never going to be okay with that. Intersectionality is necessary within our community and I feel it was irresponsible of the author to have a sympathetic character act this way.

Content notes: on-page self-harm; on-page suicide attempt including method; ableism; madphobia/misia; internalized fatphobia; food-shaming/dieting; intense bullying, including physical harm; discussion of racist microaggressions; repeated mention of child rape; PTSD from rape; anti-mad slurs (psycho, crazy); involuntary institutionalization; underage drinking; nascent alcohol abuse