What I got: something that was like 5% Crazy Rich Asians but mostly focussed on the way society deals (badly) with rape and sexual abuse, poverty, exploitation and super dysfunctional families.
I was expecting this to be a fairly vapid book, purely because a lot of the protagonists are mega rich, and yes those characters had their vapid sides to them, but they weren’t just one dimensional rich girls. The author managed to give them layers, which must have been quite an undertaking when the most visible thing about them was their wealth.
The character I liked the least was Dani, actually. She was pretty narcissistic - massively overinflated sense of her own importance, lack of empathy for others. The hissy fit she had when someone made a move on the boy she liked was quite something else.
The plot kind of meandered for the first half of the book, then got a bit of structure later on, but actually I didn’t mind. There was lots of character and situation building in the first half of the book which made it really readable. Recommended.
4 stars