Oliver Loving

11/27/2017
2.5 stars, RTC.

01/16/2018
(This review can also be found on my blog.)

Spoiler-free Review of an ARC provided by the publisher as part of a giveaway.

Let me start off by saying: this is not a bad book. But I put off writing this review for over a month because I just didn't like it at all. There are people out there who will probably love this book. Unfortunately, I just wasn't one of them.

But you were a boy who had developed a nearly anaphylactic aversion to prolonged eye contact, and you looked away, gaped awkwardly up at the sky: a poor decision.

The Good: Stefan Merrill Block is an incredible writer. The writing in this book is just so lyrical, so beautiful. I had to stop to reread passages several times because they struck me just so. There's even a queer character! Nice!

The tragedy of love, you had learned from ten years spent looking up at your mother, is that it is only possible to love perfectly a person who is lost to you[...]

Unfortunately, everything felt far too scattered for me. The book tried to cover a plethora of topics and in doing so, didn't really pay justice to any of them. I didn't find myself connecting to any of the characters, they all felt too flawed, in a way. Rebekkah felt like a cardboard cutout of a teenage girl. Oliver didn't actually care about any of the bad things happening to her as long as he got to be the white knight that saved her. I also had an issue with the way assault victims were portrayed that I can't really get into without spoiling anything.

So, for me, there was just too much bad to outweigh the good. If it sounds like something that would interest you, I think it's worth a shot! But if you don't find yourself enjoying it, I think it's also worth DNFing.