didn’t expect to enjoy this as much as i did honestly!

i do find the more and more i read the less i like the YA genre but this was a happy little book which i had fun with. i wouldn’t say i was craving to find the ending therefore that’s why its a 3-star, but i still had a good time!

i found evie very quippy and funny, and a lot more intriguing that your usual YA romance novel protagonist. her decisions at times were grating but im finding that’s the point of YA /lhj

X was…. fine. i mean immediate point ding for sharing the same name as musk’s awful website (this book was published in 2021 so yet again this is a joke). but i mean he was nice i guess. he kind of felt one-dimensional minus his backstory with clay & his dad but like… idk it didn’t go beyond that really. the last 30 pages decided to throw a random curveball to his story which i really didn’t see coming. honestly i don’t think i liked it. yes there was “foreshadowing” but idk it felt completely random and unnecessary.

nicola yoon please stop killing a main character in ur YA romances please

. i mean im not mad at it but it really wasn’t needed and felt like the tone flipped literally at the last second. not needed!

the wlw rep surprisingly fit right into the story & didn’t seem forced so as a lesbian i will take that as a win. 

fifi was…. weird. idk her characterisation reminds me of when in movies make the bad guys from somewhere like russia, serbia, etc. i mean fifi wasn’t a complete stereotype & she was a nice character by the end but i wasn’t particularly thrilled with her. why was her whole character the fact she has a thick accent. ok sure.

other side characters really had nothing going for them. evie’s dad was alright, and other than that everyone felt flat. you can only do so much in 280 pages but trying to characterise evie’s friends, her mum, her sister, X’s grandparents, his dad, shirley, shirley’s mum…. please you cannot achieve that much in such little pages. honestly you could have even removed evie’s sister and the plot really wouldn’t have suffered. and that leads me on to my final point - too much was trying to be done. like we have evie’s visions, her romance, her plot with her dad, her plot with her friends, martin’s plot, the dance competition…. too much was trying to be achieved and it resulted in nothing really “succeeding”. like i fully forgot this book was about dancing for a good while because that plot was not mentioned for a while. and then i forgot the dad plot because the dancing took up a good portion of reading time. and then the dad’s plot took up a lot of time so i forgot about the friendship plot. the book either needed to be longer to account for all of this or just chuck out some of the side plots and focus on making a few side plots and the overall plot stronger. but honestly i don’t find this egregious as it’s a YA. no shade to YA it’s probably my most read genre but i don’t pick up a YA book expecting a literary masterpiece. i expect to be entertained. and i was! but from a critical perspective……. 😬