It's hard to explain what this book is about. It's not neat. It's life—messy, and painful, and confusing. It's about being a teenager at that moment when all the decisions and changes loom ahead of you. It's about loss and grief, both the type that hovers constantly over you, almost not there but present enough to cast a thin shadow over life, and the kind that slashes your life apart. It's about the sacrifices you are willing to make for the people you love. And it's about a lot more.

Danny is in his senior year—one year until he leaves his family and goes to college. In fact, he just got accepted into the art school he applied early decision for, so he should be ready to go.

But there are things holding him back.

Danny doesn't feel ready to leave his best friend Harry, whom he has unspoken feelings for. His other friendships haven't been going so well. His parents' relationship has been increasingly unsteady, and as he starts to see hints that they have been hiding something from him, he begins to investigate.

Overall, I really liked this book. Danny is Asian-American, and I could relate to many of the things he mentioned in there. His friendship with Harry was something I also particularly liked—though I should be clear, this is not a romance. You see that they are close, but this book does not revolve around Danny discovering and confessing his feelings to Harry, where they kiss towards the end of the book and then end up happy.

What really made me take off a star was that the writing style didn't work for me. It's quite heavy to read. While the author does mostly succeed in getting Danny's thoughts and reflections across, the sentences were long and it became tedious to make sure I was reading each one right—otherwise I wouldn't get it. This book did have a lot of telling, not necessarily a bad thing, but I would have liked more scenes where I could observe and come to my own conclusions.

It was also a bit all over the place. Much of the book takes place in the past through flashbacks or explained through narrative, and a clearer timeline would have helped. However, I did enjoy seeing all the history behind each of Danny's relationships with his friends and family. There was a lot to unpack there, and perhaps what made some of it particularly painful was how... the things that happened really weren't farfetched. Not going to go into spoilers, but... these things are still happening today. People are still facing these same problems, these tough decisions.

Trigger warnings for suicide, depression, and anxiety/panic attacks.