This book is trash.

The whole premise of this book is that it’s a book about nothing, told from the perspective of two teenage girls who are chronicling how boring their lives are for a high school project. The book is supposed to be this meta self-aware commentary on YA novels and how their protagonists go through completely unrelatable story arcs and don’t reflect modern teenagers at all, but it ends up being pointless and totally offensive.

You know a book is going to be bad when it reveals itself as problematic in the first five minutes. Within the first three pages, Annie Barrows manages to disparage female queer POCs and the survivors of sexual abuse and incest, under the premise of “omg lol so meta”.

Get fucked.

You want to parody or satirise tropes in YA fiction? Try poking fun at unrealistic love triangles, “pretty girls who don’t know they’re pretty”, and insta-love. Don’t denigrate ethnic groups, people of diverse genders, sexes and sexualities, and sources of grief and trauma. And for the love of god, don’t casually throw the words “rape” and “incest” in there on the second page.