I've only been keeping a list of what I've read for the last couple of years, so I can forgive myself for accidentally reading this book again - I must have first read it in 2010 or 2011. When I picked it up in the library the storyline did ring a bell, but then I've probably picked a lot of the books in the library up before so I dismissed it as simply a book I'd read the blurb of and discarded; I do that a lot.
However, once I began reading it, some of the details of the story rang a bell: some blind guy, a girl with debilitating eczema, a breastfeeding woman. The story itself was one I vaguely remembered reading. What I didn't remember was any reaction I'd had to it which was weird; I just felt largely ambivalent to it, and I still do. Some of the reasons why:
- Reason #1: I didn't really care about any of the characters. They were all pretty 2D in my opinion and had little character development in their own right. In fact, the only reason they changed at all was due to...
- Reason #2: the book seemed to claim that everything could be solved by falling in love. Lila overcame her hatred of her own body because of falling in love; Asif overcame his hatred of his own name because of falling in love; Yasmeen wondered if her life was worth living as she may never fall in love. These characters weren't especially independent. I mean, what would happen to Lila if her and Henry split up again? Was she going to start self-harming again? It sent out a very odd message in my opinion.
- (Controversial) Reason #3: it all centred around Yasmeen's autism and how it affected everybody else, and the high focus upon autism in modern popular fiction is becoming a bit tedious, something I'll explore more in my next post.
So it was okay, not amazing, not one to especially recommend.
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