The Walls Around Us

Wow. I really did not like this, and I'm kind of stunned. I adored [b:Imaginary Girls 8603765 Imaginary Girls Nova Ren Suma https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1289841294s/8603765.jpg 13473833] and generally enjoy following Nova Ren Suma online. Normally, I'm all about the atmosphere that Suma creates, the tangible ghostliness. But instead of atmosphere, I think I just got...bad weather.It just never hit a right note. In theory, The Walls Around Us seemed to be built on the same pieces of Imaginary Girls that I loved - the relationships between women, mysterious deaths (and resurrections, so to speak), and an overall eerie atmosphere. But I never felt a connection or any actual interest in the characters. Part of this might of been intentional in the case of Violet, as there's a very good chance she's a sociopath. But, if that's the case, Suma should have gone all out with it. As it is, Violet is just a kind of mean, kind of icy girl. I was a kind of mean, kind of icy girl but I didn't kill anybody. I don't think its a spoiler to say that we know that Violet (or Vee) is guilty of something from the beginning of the story, but I never really felt her guilt. Normally, I'd blame it on the fact that I sympathize with kinda-cold-kinda-mean girls more than I should, but I didn't sympathize with Violet. I didn't give a fuck about Violet, honestly. The one chance we got to really understand Violet's guilt was taken away through blacked-out memories. I'm not trying to be the one to call for more gore and violence in YA, but I needed to feel that one on a much more visceral level. Violet's guilt is important for the conclusion of the story, and without it the ending just isn't satisfying.Though, Violet's actual crime is the betrayal of her friend. Which brings me to Ori. Ori who is so sweet and so kind she's willing to take decades in prison for a crime she didn't commit for a girl who doesn't really give a fuck about her. Who is perfect at ballet even though she doesn't like the attention it brings her, who will do anything for her sociopathic best friend and whose slightly scary boyfriend is still obsessed with even after her death. She's not remotely relatable, not even in her belated anger towards Violet. Her cellmate, Amber, who ends up telling her part of the story, might be the most interesting part of this book. I appreciated that she was a gray area between Violet and Ori's black and white, but I'm not really sure what her real purpose was. She told the story of isolation and entrapment, how easy it is to become imprisoned, one way or another. But she was this weird uncomfortable ball of arrested development, she was a child stuck in a story between two women, and it just didn't click together.I'm dumbfounded by how much I dislike this. I dislike it so much I don't want to think about it. Part of me wishes that instead of being in the style of Suma's ghostly magical realism, The Walls Around Us was an all out horror story. Four kids wandering into a haunted juvenile detention center, one wants revenge, one is fostering a terrible secret, all you would have to do is nail down the rules of the supernatural aspects more and amp up the scares, and you'd have a decent horror flick on your hands. But that is not what I got. I got a vaguely uncomfortable ghost story about two uninteresting ballerinas, and I'm supposed to want justice for one and freedom for the other, but mostly I just never want to think about this book again.