Really hated this one, honestly.
The protagonist and her boyfriend talk to each other the way an old man who hits on teenage girls would imagine teenagers talk to each other.
The one fictional serial killer listed is apparently SO scary that "the things he did were so unspeakable that the mention of that name is enough to stop a conversation in its tracks", and yet there's a whole gaggle of true crime freaks gushing and gossiping over these dead girls. Dead girls who, going off of Chekhov's Gun logic, seem to have been killed by him. Even if they weren't, there's not one serial killer on earth too gruesome for people to talk about. Anyone who knows about true crime "fans" OR small town gossip knows that.
The book asserts the protagonist as morally superior to the true crime freaks and yet she is even more obsessed with the murder of these two girls who she DIDN'T KNOW, to the point of STEALING FROM THE CRIME SCENE. I hate true crime "fans", but she's worse than them and the book has no self awareness about it.
Could the rest of the book be better than this? Sure. But I saw the pretty cover and I saw the promise of queer content and expected an entertaining First Look for a book in a genre I usually have to use librarian goggles to get through, and I was massively disappointed. I haven't read anything else by this author but based on this I'd say that they should worry more about internal logical consistency than flowery descriptions of things.
The protagonist and her boyfriend talk to each other the way an old man who hits on teenage girls would imagine teenagers talk to each other.
The one fictional serial killer listed is apparently SO scary that "the things he did were so unspeakable that the mention of that name is enough to stop a conversation in its tracks", and yet there's a whole gaggle of true crime freaks gushing and gossiping over these dead girls. Dead girls who, going off of Chekhov's Gun logic, seem to have been killed by him. Even if they weren't, there's not one serial killer on earth too gruesome for people to talk about. Anyone who knows about true crime "fans" OR small town gossip knows that.
The book asserts the protagonist as morally superior to the true crime freaks and yet she is even more obsessed with the murder of these two girls who she DIDN'T KNOW, to the point of STEALING FROM THE CRIME SCENE. I hate true crime "fans", but she's worse than them and the book has no self awareness about it.
Could the rest of the book be better than this? Sure. But I saw the pretty cover and I saw the promise of queer content and expected an entertaining First Look for a book in a genre I usually have to use librarian goggles to get through, and I was massively disappointed. I haven't read anything else by this author but based on this I'd say that they should worry more about internal logical consistency than flowery descriptions of things.