Starfish

As with most contemporaries I've been reading, this book was very mixed for me. It was very different and unique from a lot of contemporaries I've read. It took a lot of the same tropes and things from this genre and made them unique and interesting and personal. The anxiety representation was also spot on and so fantastic. It was so genuine and accurate, and I also really appreciated how Jamie would get annoyed and frustrated. In books, the love interest is always this super tolerant guy who makes the heroine's panic attacks so much easier, but his frustration with Kiko was much more realistic and I loved that. Kiko had a very beautiful, if not predictable, character arc and her growth was great to watch unfold. Despite the fact that I haven't gone through the same specific things as Kiko, I really identified and connected with her. However, the actual plot was the same unrealistic and cliche bit where teenagers can just pick up and leave and do what they want without supervision and its very tiring to keep seeing something that could never really happen. I definitely had to suspend my disbelief with a lot of the events of this book. Sometimes the writing was really beautiful and other times it felt like the ramblings of an angsty teenager without any sort of style. I also wish that the friendship with Jamie had been explored more because we're just told how perfect they are for each other without ever really seeing it.