Rating: ★★★★☆
I am surprised how emotional I got at this book! At first, it sounded like it was going to be sort of basic, but that's honestly part of its charm. Hear me out! So many YA contemporary novels try to jazz up the writing, to make the teenage narrators some philosophical, wizened people who are so enlightened about love and life. This book is just about two girls who have to deal with life as it throws some of the hardest situations at them. I related so much to some of the things the girls went through, not only with their own families but also as their friendship ended.
The way the book was written - half in chronological order and half backwards - was so interesting and new and as frustrated as I was with it at certain points I really do think it added to the story. Sure, sometimes I just wanted to know what happened next instead of being thrown into a different timeline, but having it start at both the beginning and the ending showed the minute details of why James and Kat's friendship wasn't ideal from the very start. It was also good because it constantly keeps you wondering, now how did that come about? And hypothesizing as you go. Overall I felt like it reeled me into the story and the characters more than if the story had been just chronological.
I don't know if it was the timelines or just having alternating viewpoints throughout, but this story did an extremely good job of making the reader empathize with the narrator. Every time James was narrating, I thought Kat was a jerk and James was the victim. But then every time Kat was the narrator, I was thinking about how Kat was right and James was a cold-hearted you-know-what! Maybe it just so happened that they both narrated on the months that they weren’t the jerk in the friendship (because the alternating viewpoints narrate on different months of their senior year), but overall I just felt a lot of emotion for these characters. Since their friendship ended the way it did, I feel like I should have thought one of the them was a horrible person by the end, but I really just felt like they were incompatible and it's no one's fault (although undoubtedly James was more of a jerk by the end of the novel). I thought Kat's internal monologue about how she didn't hate James even after their fight and how it just made her want to be a better person really showed her development through the novel, and I wish we had gotten more compassion/understanding out of James at the end because it kind of just ends on her part by showing her blow up at Kat and leave for college.
Overall, a very solid, realistic friend breakup book that is definitely more moving that any relationship breakup could be!!
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