Once in a while I want to take a book and toss it across the room. Sometimes that is not a bad thing. It means that it is something that made me really think, made me go oogy, but I know that it was something that was amazingly powerful and needed to be read. MAUS and MAUS II by Art Spiegelman were both like that. But Rowan & Neil, #1 Today Tonight Tomorrow was not.
Rachel Lynn Solomon, I am sure you are a very nice person. But I am very much not the audience for this book. I found it slow, the element of enemies to lovers cliche, the addition of racism for character building forced. Overall, I did not like this book. If you are into teen angst at its worst, be my guest. (Officially I couldn’t get halfway through, but the reason it’s not marked as DNF is because I deserve credit for going as far as I did.)
When I learned that this was only book one, I was disappointed. That means two things: the first, the characters solve their issues and two I wasn’t going to read that one either. When you start a book at the end of September and you’re almost five days into October and you’ve just scratched the surface, and you’re a person who reads a lot and you can move through books quickly, you know that you won’t finish and won’t be reading sequels. Now, I might read other books by Solomon, but not this series.
If you are curious about the subject: Two teens on their last day as high school seniors, have one last competition. They have had four years of one upping and getting the goat of the other one. Our main character gets into a fender bender, spills her (free coffee) and then the rest of what I read keeps mentioning “the stain on her boobs.” This day, the last two events of their high school rivalry happen: our female character loses out to her male counterpart for class valedictorian and HOWL is happening, which is a game where you have to “kill” your opponents to be the winner of the prize, and of course, bragging rights. I got to the point where they are having a break period and the final straw happened. Not only are there snarky comments about the First and Second placed characters, an obvious racist comment by a third person (who was always bronze to their golds and slivers) to show how horrible the character (the female character) is, almost lost it for me. But I was going to go a little more, to see if people are redeemed, but it then really happened. Our narrator has overheard this and is just flabbergasted that anyone would think that about her (that she isn’t nice) and would make a racist comment (which nobody but another Jewish person would understand). Yup, I wasn’t wrong. I was reading her as a selfish, rich, only child who had really lost touch with reality and that proved it.
That’s as far as I got.
Again, this is not for me. I am really sorry that I couldn’t find a way to like these people, or at least want to learn about them. Call me all the names in the book, but bad writing (or what I call bad writing) is bad writing. Do you love this book? GREAT! I am happy for you. Really. I love when a book finds love. But I just couldn’t be the one to give it.
