Where do I even start? This book was so IRRITATING!! I wrote this review in my notes, so excuse the formatting.

• UGH • All characters feel so annoying and grating o Oliver – I want to punch him in the face. He is the personification of ‘erm akschully’ bullshit and talks down to Ruth ALL THE TIME. He also seems like kind of an awful husband, reading emails when Ruth is trying to talk about things that concern her, speaking to her about things knowing she doesn’t understand just so he can feel smart, man-splaining shit all the time, calling her crazy. Ruth also notes all of this away with ‘it makes me upset but that’s just how he is’. GIRL! Leave! Talk to him about it! Something! His only reason to be in this story is to regurgitate Wikipedia and preach about nothing. o Ruth – Girl, get a spine, people do shit that makes you uncomfortable, and you do nothing about it! Then you complain! The island they live on is a more developed character than Ruth. o Nao – Where do I even start? Even though she’s the ‘main character’ of this book, I wanted to skip her POV every time. I know she’s a teenage girl, and the spooky thoughts and things are intentional, but all of her shit is so annoying. She is the ultimate ‘pick me’ in my opinion, always hating on other girls, always calling herself stupid in that ‘twirls fingers in hair’, cutesy way and never stops talking about how she ‘isn’t really Japanese’ and ‘wants to be back in California’ every other page as if we haven’t heard that before. She goes on and on about how her thoughts aren’t ‘PC’ and is the very definition of ‘I’m 14 and this is deep’. She would’ve loved Reddit (derogatory). The POVs from both female characters feel so much like ‘pick me’s that it makes me itch. • The book (as I noted above) repeats itself constantly, and the way it’s written, it feels like its intentional to try to be subtly bringing things back. The thing the book forgets is that a) most of the readers aren’t braindead, and b) it mentioned the same shit not even two pages before. If you count the times it mentions ways of killing yourself, hentai, Sunnyvale, crows, panties, etc., it’d be half the 400-ish pages just repeating the same ideas over and over. It doesn’t come across as clever or a storytelling technique, but as the author assuming her readers are dumb as rocks. • Another character point is also that every single one of them feels like an author-insert info-dumping about things they researched on Wikipedia. People sidetracking during conversation is normal and realistic, but a page-long discussion about the biology of a barnacle that doesn’t come up again and is only tangentially related to a fairly unimportant plot point isn’t worth reading. The same goes for the author providing unnecessary explanations of common occurrences and things like sleep paralysis and cats liking their backs patted. • While we’re on the subject of cats: o For the temple cat, Chibi, why is it necessary to describe how puckered its asshole is? There are so many unnecessarily gross descriptions of sexual things in here, from Nao to old women’s bodies, to the female body in general, to an indescribable number of references to rape like Nao views it as a joke. o It pisses me off that no one likes the family cat and talks so much about hating Pesto. At that point, give the cat to a better household. All Ruth or Oliver talked about was hating him and shooing him off! • This whole book reads like the author was trying to get cute and subtle about foreshadowing and references to the two timelines coming together, but it just feels like I’m being hit over the head with a cast iron skillet every two sentences. • I only picked this up because I thought the kernel of the story about writing about a 100+ year old Buddhist nun and her life story would be interesting. That never really occurs. At all. In the whole book. It is 80% Nao being whiny and annoying and not actually doing anything, 19% Ruth hating the island she lives on, and maybe 1% about Jiko. • There is not even a satisfying ending • This is a bottom-of-the-barrel YA trope book cosplaying as something adult • Everything in this book is very, very preachy and tells you what questions you're supposed to have instead of letting the reader formulate their own, which comes across, again, as doubting its reader. This book takes very adult subject matter (which really should have trigger warnings for things like: bullying, harassment, suicide/suicidal thoughts, murder, sexual assault, rape, terrorism, war crimes and a multitude of very heavy topics described in detail but also very callously) but also insists on treating its reader like they can't read. It doesn't know what it wants to be. It reads like a grammatically competent Wattpad original work circa 2014. • I know that this book has won a ton of awards, but I just really don’t get it. It irritated me to the point that it made me anxious and physically itchy, and I would’ve DNF’d it if it hadn’t been the only book on me at the time, though I think maybe being bored would’ve been better than reading this. I am not usually a fiction reader, so I’m sure that also influences my dissatisfaction, but would like to understand why so many people enjoy it, I really would.