This was the story of Si Si and Kat, two girls who meet for the first time as children and become best friends before Si Si is taken into care and they lose contact. Thirteen years later, Si Si and her foster mum move back into town and the two girls reconnect. There's the usual thing about how they hate each other first of all before being thrown together for a school project and becoming friends. Woop! Woop! YA cliche alert!
So first, the positive. I actually quite liked the two MCs. They were fully-formed characters and I liked them, especially Si Si/Liz. She was really fun and kind of wild.
Anyway, that's all the positive. Now on to what I didn't like.
Let's start with the writing style. I get that this was a self-published number and I'm always more generous with self-published work, but the writing tended towards the rambling and there was a real lack of clarity. In addition there were a lot of spelling and punctuation errors that made the writing just not flow properly.
As mentioned, the plot was cliched, but I could probably forgive the uninspiring plot, if it wasn't for all the other bizarreness crammed into this book.
Some of the things that happened in this book were just weird and disturbing. So, Kat's mum is dying of cancer in hospital. It's really sad, but she is in hospital with all the medical care paid for by the military and, you would assume, access to pain relief. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when Kat goes into the hospital and shoots her mum up with heroin. Yes, heroin. And it's dealt with in a 'yeah, this isn't a big deal' way. Just an every day occurrence for a teenager to obtain heroin, bring it into a hospital, shoot her mum up and for her mum to not die of an overdose when the heroin mixes with all the other opiates she's taking. I rubbed my eyes and re-read the passage because I couldn't quite believe what I'd read. Does that really happen? I'm fairly sure it doesn't.
Then there's the bit where Si Si gets totally off her face and a guy has sex with her and she can't remember anything about it the next day. I mean, that's rape, isn't it? Having sex with someone when they're too out of it to consent is still called rape, isn't it? But this rape is just brushed under the carpet. Similarly, when Kat's brother invites Si Si into his room under the guise of showing her his video games, tells her to close her eyes and puts his penis in her hand. It was just weird and wrong and gross and, oh yeah, SEXUAL ASSUALT. And neither of these scenarios get addressed, other than in a 'Well, boys will be boys' way. This is bullshit and scenarios like these in YA books are EXACTLY the reason why girls don't go to the police when they've been assaulted. It feeds into this horrible societal narrative that says it's OK for dudes to assault women.
OK, let's talk about sex now. There was some odd, odd sex in this book. So the first time there's any sexual contact is where the two MCs are laying on a bed watching TV, one of them falls asleep and inadvertently rolls on top of the other one and jams her thigh between her legs. The other girl then has an instant orgasm. I'm not ... I just ... I don't really know how to describe it. It just felt like the most unrealistic representation of Something That Would Actually Happen that I've ever read. They hadn't been fooling around (in which case I could almost believe the instant orgasm, just about), they'd just been watching TV. Normal TV, not porn. And later in the book was a sex scene in a hotel that had no build-up to make it sexy and awesome, it was just grabby and hard and ended up with one of the girls crying. I think it was supposed to be hot, but it really, really wasn't.
I'm sure there are other things I disliked about this book, but I can't face re-reading any of it to list them. Suffice to say this was not a good book and you shouldn't read it.
1 star