Thea

Overall, this is an okay read. I thought it was pretty well-written and it definitely held my attention. However, the subject matter was ultimately not for me. At times, it felt as though the writing was a bit too flowery for the narrator (a middle school girl), and some of the plot choices were a bit confusing. The concept was interesting, but ultimately, I wouldn't read this again.

Truly a wonderful book! I especially enjoyed the character development and magic system. One of my favorite things about this story was that I expected how it ended, but not at all how it got there. There was also a moment near the end that I thought it wouldn't end that way, and the suspense of how things were going to play out was really quite fun. I expect that to be something I enjoy in a lot of Sanderson's other books.

Something that I didn't really enjoy was the emphasis on the main character's experience with sexual assault and general physical abuse. While I think this is a really important topic and something which would absolutely have a profound impact on Vin and her character, it felt kind of gross for a guy to be writing about this experience so much and putting such a huge emphasis on it. I don't know quite how to express my feelings about this particular aspect of the book, but it just doesn't sit right with me, and that's why I didn't give it five stars.

Spoiler free section

I did not like this book. I found that the main character was relatively easy to get invested in, at least a little bit. That's honestly what kept me reading the book. I wanted her to succeed in life, and wanted to find out what happened to her. That being said, there were so many problematic things in this book that were not treated as problematic which made reading it very bad. Without going into details, there were disordered eating thoughts which were glossed over, as well as blatant homophobia. (If you have a history of restrictive eating disorders, I would be very wary of reading this book, as I have that kind of history, and the book was slightly triggering.) I thought the characters were flat and boring as well. There weren't really any characters that were developed apart from the main character, which I guess isn't too big of a problem, but it still kind of annoyed me. Additionally, the story was quite hard to follow sometimes.

SPOILERS

Okay, really.

WHAT was that ending???? I really can't deal with that. I get that this book is meant to show the dangers of drugs, but that was just absolutely horrible. You can't just have your character go through a full “redemption” arc, pretty much twice, and have then just kill them without warning.

All right, now that I got that off my chest, I found the fact that the disordered eating thoughts at the beginning were not addressed later in the book to be very disheartening. I know this was written well before eating disorders were studied (and they still need to be studied more thoroughly than they have been), but the amount of restrictive eating that happened in the beginning and then the utter lack of restricted thoughts in the last 2/3rds of the book was weird. Eating disorders don't just go away, and I thought the way the book handled that subject matter was very inadequate and harmful.

Honestly, all I can say for this book was that it was short and relatively engaging.