reviewe- Solitaire

From what I know, this is Alice Oseman’s Debut novel, and compared to her other books that I have read of hers, which are Radio Silence and I Was Born For This, this book does not live up to the quality of those two books. I was excited to start this one since I loved those two books and comparing these two to this book is that I can certainly say that she has improved greatly as a writer.

Now, I’m not one that reads many contemporary novels, and as such, I may be sprouting absolute rubbish in my review, and for that, I apologise. I would simply like to start with the fact that the entire book was a bit weird and there’s no real plot or anything really as to what is actually going on, which left me a the reader not knowing what the entire objective of the book was. Many things also don’t make a whole lot of sense as to why such a thing happened, or even how, some of the events in this book occurred as the reasoning from some characters feel really poor. Almost as if the author didn’t know but needed it to work and was just like, here you go, I know this doesn’t make sense but deal with it.

If I am being honest, the character development with the main character was very minimal, whenever there appeared to have some change occurring from her depressive state, she simply went back again, which I understand that the author is trying to show a character battling depression. The thing is, was that I would have liked to maybe see her slowly come out of it, or even to slowly accept for who she is, which would have been nice instead of from what we got.

Now, like I mentioned above, the entire story really does not go anywhere, maybe except for the very end, despite how overly dramatic and perhaps slightly unrealistic it was. It just feels like a mindless collection of parties, going to school and all that, which, probably might have been fine if the reader was given some character progression, which didn’t really happen all that much. Everyone was where they had started from the beginning of the book, except for the last fifty odd pages. Leaving it to the end is great and all, but I normally need something else to compel me on instead of just a book that is essentially ‘day in the life.’

Also, wow, they are lots of annoying characters that seem to be there for the sake of being annoying to show how bad the character’s state is in. Some of the actions from the characters honestly had me slightly perplexed though this may have been exemplified by the unreliable narration from a character that is ultimately depressed.

While I have really enjoyed two other contemporaries by this author, this one ultimately fell a bit flat for me. 5.5/10