Caro
I tore through this one, it's such a fast read that "one more chapter" turned into way past midnight (even though these are some long chapters). Rishi shows up at Stanford as this burnt out teenage climate activist who just wants to stop saving the world for five minutes and actually live, study literature, fall in love, mess around. Then COVID empties the campus and she ends up on a farm collective with everyone, and the book turns into this messy tangle of politics and desire and people figuring out what they owe each other. The pandemic setting could have felt gimmicky but it gave the whole thing this trapped, pressure cooker feeling that really worked for me.
What got me most was watching Rishi keep making the exact same mistakes, falling into the same patterns and situationships and never quite learning. Normally that drives me up the wall, but here it felt painfully real instead of annoying, very true to being young and a bit lost. My one tiny gripe is the thing with Georgia, because we never find out what that email says since Rishi just deletes it without reading it, and the nosy part of me really wanted to know. But that's probably the point. Four stars, quick, queer, smart, and stuck with me for days.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC
I tore through this one, it's such a fast read that "one more chapter" turned into way past midnight (even though these are some long chapters). Rishi shows up at Stanford as this burnt out teenage climate activist who just wants to stop saving the world for five minutes and actually live, study literature, fall in love, mess around. Then COVID empties the campus and she ends up on a farm collective with everyone, and the book turns into this messy tangle of politics and desire and people figuring out what they owe each other. The pandemic setting could have felt gimmicky but it gave the whole thing this trapped, pressure cooker feeling that really worked for me.
What got me most was watching Rishi keep making the exact same mistakes, falling into the same patterns and situationships and never quite learning. Normally that drives me up the wall, but here it felt painfully real instead of annoying, very true to being young and a bit lost. My one tiny gripe is the thing with Georgia, because we never find out what that email says since Rishi just deletes it without reading it, and the nosy part of me really wanted to know. But that's probably the point. Four stars, quick, queer, smart, and stuck with me for days.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC