Started 12/25 | Finished 12/26 (late night binge sesh!) | read time: ~4.5 hrs | pages: 384
"You’re a hundred shades of a girl."
I was in search of anything instantly-available in ebook format through my library and a few pages into the young-adult selections, this one popped up with no hold! and check out that cover, how could I not click?"This new generation doesn’t seem to play by any of the rules we’ve learned to fight against."the blurb got me (who can resist forbidden love), and by the time i was ready to put down the tablet and go to sleep, it was 12:15 in the morning and the kindle was telling me i only had one hour's worth of pages left anyway.
well, let's begin.
The Good
- latinx setting and characters! so many mentions of tortillas and salsas, the latin influence on the worldbuilding was a delight
- LGBTQ+ romance (whoops, spoiler?). Carmen is adorable!
- writing style and cliffhangers were satisfactory enough for me to read this in one sitting
- revolutionary story is believable and the scope has potential to fill a lot of books in a series (oh, snap, looks like the next one is in Carmen's perspective!)
- the non-Christian lore background is a fresh take on an otherwise Handmaid's Tale-inspired dystopia
- yay girl power! nothing super surprising or revolutionary on this front, but coupled with the girl-girl romance... i'm not missing dudes or anything here.
- did i mention that cover?
- the two wives idea makes a great commentary on how dang hard it is to juggle all of the roles of being a woman and a mom
- doctors evaluate women for preparedness before they are forced to carry children for their rich/powerful husbands and Dani mentions that it's not normally until they are past 20, so i appreciated that caveat
The Bad
- why is Dani so angry? why is so much of the text devoted to saying how angry Dani is? whenever she launches into an angry tirade i want to scream! just cut to the chase!
- supporting characters get 4 scenes tops and feel less like real people than plot devices. Dani's interactions with all of them don't develop organically, so things seem to jump quicker than expected.
- seriously, i feel so mad at Dani for robbing us of a decent story by just going on rants about class warfare. we get it! we're all living in the 2010s!
- the romance was a little surprising BUT it didn't develop and was almost a textbook case of insta-love. i personally believe that people ARE dumb between the ages of 12-17 and you can find yourself loving someone you previously hated, but it needs to happen faster than over a course of what...two weeks?!
- polygamy makes me cringe no matter how well it's explained!
Loved
- Carmen, Carmen, Carmen. "Is this okay?" will stick out in my mind for quite a few weeks it was so CUTE!
- please talk about salsa more in book two
- lol Mateo you suck and your wives got together!
Hated
- Dani is so very much a predictable character that fits into a typical cookie cutter...a queer romance doesn't distract enough from that
- what'd we get...two decent action scenes? i really didn't expect so much palace intrigue
Heck yeah i'll be there with bells on for the sequel. stick like four or five more developmental scenes into it and cut back on the proletariat ranting and it's a classic
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