This book started out great. It's about a mysterious illness known as the violence that causes the afflicted to attack the nearest person and after they're done their memory of that moment is wiped out and they can carry on like nothing has happened. And in the midst of that strange epidemic there's Chelsea and her daughters, that suffer from a different, more sinister type of violence: severe abuse from her husband.

This could have been such an impactful story about victims of abuse, but for me the message got lost the moment CHELSEA JOINED A FAKE WRESTLING RING. From that the story got unbearable for me. It was such a shift from the serious tone the book had up to that point. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be moved by Florida Woman (that's Chelsea's wrestling name) learning how to fake fight while wearing a torn tank top. Yeah, she learned to be stronger and blah blah blah. But couldn't that have been achieved by her doing literally anything else?

I liked Ella's part of the story the most, because it managed to retain the serious and engaging tone. I felt the most for her, because she was just a kid that was forced to act like an adult. She had to take on some of her mother's responsibilities, like caring for her younger sister, because of what her mom was going through.

Brooklyn, Chelsea's five year old daughter is just like most kids in books for me -a little annoying. I had to remind myself she was five whenever she did something stupid and it still was hard for me not to get annoyed. She gets separated from her sister and mother and has to live with her grandma Patricia. Patricia who was an abusive mother to Chelsea, has to suddenly stop caring only about herself and step up to the role of a grandma. Her character development was honestly not so believable to me. I feel like she didn't do enough self-reflection and instead got magically cured by a presence of her granddaughter.

Overall, this book is interesting and has a lot to say... just not to me. By the end I was really forcing myself to continue reading. The wrestling part was just to ridiculous to me.