This was an okay read for me personally and wasn’t able to do much for me but I think it might be a very important read for some. 

The writing style is not my cup of tea. It spells out a lot and tells you a lot. It feels a bit like a self help/advice book for young queer teens at times. It was too on the nose for me and I personally didn’t get anything out of it. When I started it felt like the kind of book for people who know basically nothing about queerness and what it’s like. So either a queer person’s first queer book or someone who wants to learn about the queer experience. That is definitely not close to where I stand, since me as a queer person am far beyond that point, so it didn’t offer me anything through that. 

I do think that this can be a really valuable book for young queer teens to read. The beauty, struggles, doubts, intimacy, and awkwardness of a first relationship is portrayed beautifully. I saw a lot of my first relationship in them. Sometimes a bit too much for comfort since my partner was also living with their emotionally abusive parent and learned how to get out of it. So that hit a bit too close to home. But I think it’s so important to have that kind of story in books, so I’m glad it was there. I would have wished it would have gone the extra step to actually call it emotional abuse. With everything being spelt out so much, I think this would have been one of the most important ones to call it by its name. But sadly that didn’t happen. 

Ryan and Avery are very cute though and I wish them the very best.