Ellie K

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE READING THE BOOK! I like the writing style and it has some very thought-provoking, intelligently written passages, which are, in fact, the sole reason I decided to stick it out and finish the book, despite how bored I was reading it. It’s honestly one of the most boring books I’ve ever read. I really don’t see the hype. There were no majorly interesting plot points until like two thirds of the way through. Firstly, it’s majorly, and I mean majorly, about gaming. The author ignores the (barely existing) plot and characters, especially while describing Sam and Sadie’s first game Ichigo, and just describes at length boring stuff about the graphics, the storyline of the game, etc. It was just unnecessary and unappealing to non-gamers. I couldn’t care less how they come up with ideas for their game because it wasn’t relevant to Sam and Sadie and I’m reading the book to find out about Sam and Sadie, not their game. All that needed to be said was that they were making a game called Ichigo and that’s it. Even the fact that the cover depicts the Hokusai wave, which was an inspiration for their first game, indicates that the book is more about their games than their friendship or the characters themselves. That being said, I did like the sort of flashbacks that help the reader see a bit of Sam and Sadie’s past, both as friends and as individuals. I enjoyed some of the themes involved such as racial identity, even suicide. I don’t feel like the author illustrated the dynamic between Sadie and Sam well enough. I didn’t feel the warmth of their supposedly close and comfortable friendship. Granted, this may be difficult to achieve as it’s written in the third person, but given that the whole point of the book was their relationship, I feel like the author should have definitely tried harder to show WHY these two characters love each other. Therefore, when they said “I love you” to each other, it sounded weird to me. I do like that the author explores a purely platonic relationship between a girl and a guy, which is uncommon in books nowadays. I hated Dov, but again, the author didn’t do a good enough job of portraying the feelings Sadie had towards him, and why people in her situation don’t immediately run away from that kind of relationship, which I feel is a really important and sensitive topic, and if you’re going to include something heavy like that in your book and not do it properly, why do it at all? I think Colleen Hoover’s “It ends with us” explores this much much better. Also there’s apparently some controversy that people think the game “Solution” that Sadie makes is offensive (involves something about Nazis), however, I think people get offended by things way too freaking easily. Get over it. I think the game is actually genius and really interesting. It made me think. So overall, I think this book was a waste of time, but not the worst book I’ve ever read, so I’d rate it 5/10. It just didn’t make me feel anything at all (except perhaps boredom), and emotion is supposed to be a major part of “deep” books like this.