Solitaire in Rolling with the lgbt

Nov 16, 2022 atlas ♡ rated it it was ok

i sort of hated everyone in this book but yk

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Apr 24, 2020 Eva B. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: young-adult, slump-cures, metaphorical-tears-were-shed, queer-sides, friendships-are-magic, favorite-characters, underrated, best-of-the-best-of-the-best, books-4-beck

If you want to know the truth, the Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorite books of all time, and so I was a bit suspicious of the blurb of this one. Publishers always wanna compare books about teenage sadness and mental health to Catcher, and I always sort of raise my eyebrows at that. See, they always wanna reel in readers by comparing contemporaries to famous books, and then you read the book and it's pretty goddamn phony. But Solitaire?

Solitaire is not a perfect book. I mean, no book is a If you want to know the truth, the Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorite books of all time, and so I was a bit suspicious of the blurb of this one. Publishers always wanna compare books about teenage sadness and mental health to Catcher, and I always sort of raise my eyebrows at that. See, they always wanna reel in readers by comparing contemporaries to famous books, and then you read the book and it's pretty goddamn phony. But Solitaire?

Solitaire is not a perfect book. I mean, no book is a perfect book, but old Solitaire definitely has flaws. Michael Holden is sort of a manic pixie dream boy for most of it, Evelyn is sort of there to be the early 2010s mean girl, and it's pretty unrealistic with the bigger pranks and all. I'm not kidding, the final prank was unrealistic as hell, and you can definitely tell that Solitaire is a phony organization.

But I don't think I've ever read a modern YA contemporary that hit me quite like Solitaire did. See, at the risk of getting too personal, I'm not afraid of dying. Never have been. But I am afraid of dying without doing anything worthwhile in my life. I mean living as a sort of passive observer in the world and never doing a single goddamn thing to change it.

As you can probably guess, I really felt for Tori. She's one of the one-in-a-million contemporary YA female leads that is allowed to be harsh, and self-loathing, and, at the bottom of it all, scared. And while my mental health is generally better now, Tori felt like me a few years ago. Tori felt like me in my worst moments. Tori shows the inelegant side of mental health that's usually brushed over in the name of romanticization, because you can't have your dEeP aNd hAuNtiNg romance with suicide for shock factor if you focus on the unromanticized bit. That probably didn't make much sense in writing. It didn't make too much sense in my head, and this review is sort of a goddamn rambly mess, but what I'm trying to say is that even with its flaws, Solitaire felt raw . It felt real. It felt unpolished and I think that's why I loved it so much and why I love Catcher and why I love old Alice Oseman in general. Solitaire won't be for everyone, but God, Solitaire felt like it was written for me. ...more

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