While it’s a very well-written book and the characters feel so real (at times frustratingly so), the book is entirely too long. I kinda feel like I read every single thought and feeling Julia ever experienced, and it got exhausting about halfway through the novel. I appreciated how realistically she was rendered and completely understood how her childhood experiences resulted in her blunt and often intractable personality, but she was so irritating and difficult to sympathize with a lot of the time. I’m not saying characters, especially female ones, have to always be likeable, but man, Julia and her mother were so hard to stomach.