Zarin was the girl people were warned to stay away from, always a troublemaker with too many boys around. So when she and her best friend Porus end up in a car accident, dead, it’s only then that people start to see there was more to Zarin, than what everyone said about her. Told in reverse chronological order, this novel was an interesting rollercoaster of a book to read. It started off really confusing because there were so many points of view that we didn’t know who our main characters were supposed to be. To add to that, we didn’t even know if they were alive or not. The way the author tried to format the book so that the tense shifted, just left the reader very confused. It took a good little while before the reader could grasp what was going on and to actually start to enjoy the book. For the most part, yes this book was good, it had a good message and the reader appreciated what she was trying to go for, but it didn’t feel like it always hit the mark. The reader wanted more from the characters. We got a basic understanding of them and their lives, which the author did a great job of describing the ways in which both men and women have their very strict gender norms and rules in Saudi Arabia, that part was so well done because it’s a topic this reader is only mildly aware of, so this book gave a great eye into that life. But it felt like so much more could have been given to us, especially our secondary characters Zarin’s aunt and uncle. There’s this big plot point that Zarin’s mother died when she was young so she had to live with her relatives, but we never get more than that. It’s always alluded to from her aunt, mostly, who was seen as crazy, but the reader wanted to know so much more about that. There was a whole story that felt was missing. Sure that wasn’t exactly Zarin’s story, but it would play a large roll in it, and give the reader so much more. We thought we might have gotten some answers near the end, but the novel just kind of ends after the climax. The pacing was good, there was enough tension and suspense to keep the reader invested. They already knew what had happened, as it was told to us in the very beginning, but we didn’t know how it happened, so the whole novel was a playback and a lead up to the events. It could get emotional at times because there was a lot going on and definitely has trigger warnings for date rape, and sexual assault. In the end, this novel had importance and could be quite heavy, but this reader found it was lacking a bit in terms of character growth and the plot development could have been a bit better; that said, this is still worth the read.