The main thing I disliked was that the tone was entirely wrong. The whole premise of the book was that this girl, Alice, develops leukaemia and puts together a bucket list of revenge on the people who have pissed her off. Then she goes into remission and has to go back to school and face the people she's wreaked havoc on.
This book would have worked better with a snarky, sharp, sarcastic tone. I mean, seriously. You spend half a year being evil thinking there'll be no consequences and then BAM. Joke's on you 'coz you're going to live after all. Instead the narrative was kind of melancholy and had no injections of the humour it desperately needed.
I couldn't stand Alice. Like, I detested her. In contrast, Harvey was lovely but Alice was such a miserable cow I actually thought less of him for putting up with her. If a guy had been treating a girl the way Alice treated Harvey,we'd have all been up in arms, because her treatment of him was emotional abuse. And before anyone says, 'But she had CANCER! Of course she was UPSET!' from what I could tell, Alice was a cow before her diagnosis (and I don't want to downplay in any way the horror of cancer - to watch yourself slowly disintegrating must be beyond horrific and I think the author actually did an okay job of portraying this, as well as the way it affected Alice's parents).
The structure of the book was also a bugbear for me. It is told from a dual viewpoint and dots between the past and the present seemingly at random. It made for confusing reading and didn't endear me to the story or engage me at all. I really couldn't tell why the author had employed this structure. Maybe there was a reason, but I couldn't see it.
The writing itself was fine, and the author is obviously trained and capable. I just think this wasn't the right project for her.
2 stars