Short version: the best part of this book was a 4 year old

Longer version:
I liked the characters pretty quickly and the variety of relationship dynamics. But after about half of the book, Eli lost favor in my eyes (see below). There were some really sweet and meaningful scenes that kept this book afloat, but largely it was pretty put-downable and I probably won't think about this much after today.

The writing took a little to get used to. The narrator for Eli was choppy and made his chapters more irritating to listen to (obviously not a critique of the author, that's on the narrator). Not to mention the character being written to kind of disregard other people's feelings and then wonder why people would be upset with him?

The ending?? It was so rushed like literally everything went from chaos to complete resolution in about 5 seconds and it felt so unnatural.

But the photo recreation scene was brilliant and I laughed SO HARD at the Legolas cardboard cutout that I sent myself into a coughing fit for about a whole minute. So that's something.