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A review by mmccombs
How to Hide in Plain Sight by Emma Noyes
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
I think I liked this? On the whole, the story and character development was interesting. Sitting in Eliot’s brain was impactful and I appreciated that her experience with OCD directly impacted the romance/plot, which made everything feel more realistic. I do think it was a bit long and repetitive, I spent a good amount of this internally yelling at them to just talk or kiss already. And I felt weird when the author constantly described the (only) nonwhite character’s skin and eyes as honey/almond/chocolate (basically any food) while every other (white) character is not really described at all. There were quite a few awkward sentences along the lines of “copper arms enveloped me” that could have just… dropped the constant need to remind the reader that Manuel was brown. Got it! He was pretty well developed as a friend and love interest, which made their relationship interesting, but I was very distracted by the writing style. All this to say, I think this was very well done OCD rep and just fine at everything else.
Graphic: Child death, Mental illness, and Grief