Hi! I'm Selan. I love anime, sci-fi & fantasy, Kirby and 90s JRPGs. Right now I'm trying to expand my collection of books.
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Trigger warning: Self-harm. Uh, a lot of self-harm. Almost every chapter has some explicit scene about self-harm, I'm not even kidding here.
This book was terrible. I've read Eve Ainworth's Seven Days, and that was bad too, but this one manages to be worse. I mean, when I saw that the book would be talking about self-harm and stuff, I was really excited to see how it would handle it. I thought it might actually turn out to be interesting to read.
Which it was, yes - the self-harm itself is dealt with appropriately and I can appreciate that. The author certainly did her research in that regards. However, most of the book is unreadable due to one fatal oversight, and it is this.
The main character has an atrocious personality, bitches at everyone, is judgmental, a complete hypocrite, treats her entire family like shit, is selfish to no end, and is overall a really shitty person and I really didn't care about her life.
I mean come on. To start off with, the book was just depressing. Really depressing, even before any mention of self-harm came into it. I could not STAND Gabi and started skim-reading parts where she started doing her internal monologuing (which she did a LOT) because she was just moping about and whining about her grandpa.
Everytime her mum turned up, I would tense up, because Gabi spends most of the book screaming at her mum or fighting with her, even though it's obvious that her mum is actually trying to help or repair the rift between them. Does Gabi notice this? Oh, no. She just continues to be this really shitty daughter and I cannot believe that the author would expect us to root for her.
The blurb on the back of the book says something like "Confident, popular Gabi has a a secret, a secret so terrible she can't her family, or her best friend" - okay let me just stop you there. I never got the feeling that Gabi confident or popular. She's constantly depressed all the time and I never got the impression that she was a "popular girl" or anything...but whatever.
The actual self-harm scenes were done well and conveyed a lot of emotion. Gabi started cutting herself every other chapter and going on similar self-harm websites, and then she remembers that there was this other girl she used to know who was always cutting herself. What does she do? Oh, she goes up to her and calls her "a stupid bitch"...yeah, thanks Gabi, you're really increasing my respect for you here.
At the end of every chapter, you get a flashback of Gabi's memories with her grandfather. Actually, I started to warm to him. I enjoyed reading about him. He was a character that seemed well-thought out and didn't make me want to throw up everytime he spoke. Unfortunately, he starts to become pretty shitty towards the end of the book, so that's that part gone and wasted.
I really didn't like any of the characters. Gabi's friends didn't appeal to me. There's a guy who she ends up with and he made no impact on me whatsoever. Oh, and there's a fucking love triangle between two guys, neither of whom I care about. I cared a little about her best friend, with whom she almost never opens up at all.
Oh, and near the end, one of Gabi's friends mentions to her that yes, we knows you've been self-harming, we can SEE the marks on your skin whilst you're skating. So she's completely failed in covering it up, too.
If I was a bit younger, I might have said that Gabi acts like a total shithead because she's a "typical teenager" - well, that's not quite true. She's a bit TOO stereotypical. I know that not all teenagers act like this, but she just whines and bitches at her mum and is just so negative all the time! It was intolerable.
Now, the book actually improves in the last couple of chapters or so. We learn that the real reason why Gabi is like this is because she feels responsible for the death of a loved one. Okay, thanks for clearing that up, because before then it literally felt like she was just really really sad about her grandpa.
It was actually readable in that last chapter because her mother opens up to her, and for once Gabi isn't screaming her head off at her and they're actually having a proper conversation. No idea if that will last. It almost felt out of character because she'd spent the entire book hating her mother. Her mum would notice her scars and be concerned about her but no, our protag just throws it back in her face and even does her physical arm in one chapter.
Although it did improve at the last second, it's really not enough to save this book. Yes, it told us quite a bit about self-harm, but our protag was such an awful person that I honestly felt dissuaded from reading this at all. There are better ways to do this. Focus on the tragedy as well as the mentality of the individual. The love triangle was half-assed too.
All in all, I can't give this more than a 2/5. God, this was a trainwreck.