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I listened to the audiobook. I really struggled with how many stars to give this, between two and three. The first third of the book is fantastic, I was really interested and invested in the character's journey. Jess seems like a product of her time, and not a modern day insert for the first third or so. She's someone you can root for, and I honestly didn't have that much trouble suspending disbelief that she could pretend to be a man for so long.

I started to lose interest as we got into long, wandering descriptions of sharp shooting, scenes that could have been ten minutes dragged on for thirty. For a long time there were just endless sidequests and then Jess finally finds her brother and things really got dry and boring after that, to the point that I was so tired of listening to the story, I kept speeding it up. I just wanted the book to be over and felt the story should have ended hours and hours ago. By the end I was at 2.5x speed and doing something else so I wasn't even paying attention and I have no idea how the book ended and I aggressively don't care.

The writing itself was beautiful, and I did enjoy the character's voice and the author remaining consistent throughout. Honestly, I just think this book should have been about half the length that it was.

A deeply important book, looking at a class that we habitually demonize but do not understand.

First of all, I would say, don't read this when you're in a dark state of mind. It is extremely heavy, for such a short work.

This book is a beautiful memoir of life lived as a rural, poor American. I could relate to so much of it, having grown up with a large, working class family on a farm in the middle of nowhere. We need to hear more stories from people on the edges of society, the people most affected by the opioid epidemic, by suicide, by financial ruin from their medical problems.

I found the stories of his friends, in particular the man with cystic fibrosis and the man struggling with opioid addiction, and his father, really effecting. I work in healthcare. I see these people every day, and it made me deeply sad.

Please read this book, reflect on it, ponder it, and work to demand a better life for those on the edges of society. People like Adam's family and friends make up an enormous portion of our population, but have so little voice in what happens in the US, and so little access to healthcare, which I firmly believe is a human right.

The bleakest story I have ever read. 5/5 stars.

It's been more than a month now since I finished this book, so it's certainly high time I processed my emotions and put in a review.

This book is powerful. The writing is incredible. Every character is not only a fully realized human being (with all the flaws, faults, absurdities, cruelties, baseness, and deepest sadnesses that being a human entails), but they are all people that you've encountered in your life. They are the real folks on the street corner, serving food at the diner, working as a cashier, sitting on the bed in the hospital, across from you in the office in their cubicle, slogging through this troublesome journey called life. These characters are the people all around you, living real lives of quiet despair that you only catch a glimpse of once in a while. People making the wrong choices and dealing with the consequences of their actions or the consequences of the terrible, devastating misfortunes that life inevitably thrusts upon them.

The realness of the story is what makes it so incredibly bleak. Because real life is scary, painful, and oftentimes hopeless You don't get easy answers, none of us do. When things go wrong, you don't get some deus ex machina to fix it. It just sucks and you have to live with the fall out. There are no good people, there are just people, trying to do their best and fucking it up at every turn. That's how this book is, that's how things go for every character. Just like real life. There are no heroes here.

This is a masterful, powerful book that is well worth your time. If you read nothing else this year, read Lonesome Dove, but know that it is the most bleakly realistic fiction you may ever read. No one is getting out unscathed, least of all the reader.

4.5/5 stars, rounded up. A clever, well-written book full of mystery, intrigue, and beauty.

This book was really enjoyable and interesting and clearly well-edited. I originally picked this up because I encountered a patient who was reading it at the hospital, and asked more about the book and found it intriguing. The characters have a lot of depth and I really enjoyed reading about them and exploring them. The ending felt a little dissatisfying but I'm not sure why that is and I think it was just subjective. This is not really a genre that I typically read, so perhaps that's why. I do appreciate that the story ended and the plot wrapped up nicely.

I hugely appreciated the somewhat more realistic recovery from a severe head injury that is portrayed here, with her eventual recovery being seen as miraculous by healthcare providers. A lot of books have people just wake up with no deficits after a severe head injury and no explanation for this kind of wizardy that really does not happen physiologically. This patient had to undergo months of therapy as one would expect to relearn how to live, and had lasting problems from her head injury. The book gives a lot of Stranger Things type vibes with how the story turns out, so if you enjoyed Stranger Things and are looking for something a tad more adult, this book will probably be right up your alley. There's definitely room for a sequel which I think I would also enjoy.

This was like reading an I Can Read Book but for adults, because no kid would slog through such a boring story. It was a physically painful chore to read, but I forced myself to keep going to see what all the fuss was about and . . . yeah, I don't get it. The prose is childishly bad. Just a litany of "then Viv did this, then she picked up a cup, then she washed the dishes, then she exploited her employees", and that is hardly an exaggeration. It's basically capitalist propaganda. The dialogue is like a hallmark movie or the Star Wars prequel scripts.

This definitely reads like the first draft of a NaNoWriMo project. The author is just describing things to fill the word count, but the story isn't going anywhere and there is nothing happening. I almost hurled the book across the room when the resolution of the "threat" of the mobsters who are just extorting people all over town, is to pay them in cinnamon rolls?! I had to check the book's details again to make sure I wasn't reading a board book for babies. For the record, the only reason I didn't throw it is because it was borrowed from a friend.

Would not recommend. It's poorly written, the characters have zero depth and nuance, the message is so trite and cringey it will hurt your soul. Should have DNF-ed. But hey, at least it's short, rocked it out in two days between shifts at work.

4.5/5 stars, rounded up. This book is historical romance, FYI, so keep that in mind if you want to read it, you have to enjoy romance. While I typically don't read romance, (though I love historical fiction) I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The characters are overall believable, engaging, and you want them to succeed, which is really important for any story. I liked that the book was never preachy, the story was not lost in the message which I find common in a lot of traditionally published books in the US these days.

The romance definitely gets hot and heavy at parts and there is quite a bit of sex between many different folks. So if that's not your thing I wouldn't recommend reading it. Towards the later parts of the books there was a bit of contrived drama, which always loses me a little, but overall I really enjoyed this author's work and am thinking about picking up the rest of her stuff at some point here.

Entertaining, light popcorn type fair. Not a lot of substance, but enjoyable.

Expected to despise this book, in part because I really disliked these characters from the Netflix series "Shadow and Bone" and because I am not a fan of YA, but it was actually pretty enjoyable for a while. Did get a bit tiresome near the end.

The plot is pretty predictable. The characters are rather superficial. Everyone has some tragic sob story, which gets pretty old after a while, constant flashbacks break a lot of the tension.

Kaz is a garbage character. The author tells us a hundred times what a terrible person he is, but he seems fine and his sob story was the least believable and most tiresome of them all.

All the characters should have been older, but the author had to make them fit into the YA group so they HAD to be 17 and we the readers HAD to have the beaten into our heads a thousand times.

At the end, I felt nothing for any of the characters and don't care at all to read the next book, honestly. But overall I would say the book as enjoyable. Not a lot of substance, didn't take home any deep or meaningful messages from this one. Would recommend if looking for some entertainment without depth.