I have a lot of mixed emotions after finishing this book. The last chapter and the epilogue really brought it home for me, but I felt it was clunky in places and the story takes a bit too long to get into. But I think the explorations of grief, addiction, sisterhood, and pain are beautifully done. And finally getting to a place of at least partial “happiness” at the end was definitely redeeming for me personally. My biggest issue is that I didn’t like most of the characters for 95% of the book and I just kept reading because I’m a hater by nature and want to have a reason behind my hate. Joke’s on me because I ended up really loving the end, despite it not being the most exciting or compelling way to get there from the jump.

P.S. I found parts of this writing style to be a bit weird. It was almost like we clicked “thesaurus” on a few words just to make it seem literary. For example, “insouciant” was used far too often in this book. It’s an obscure word at best. At worst it was distracting from the actual story we were trying to tell. I love a new vocab word, but this maybe went too far (and often).