This is a book that I have been looking forward to reading for quite some time, so it's disappointing to say that I did not enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I simply do not understand the hype that this book gets. For me, it felt like in all areas, the book does not go far enough. The world-building is interesting, but the author could have gone a little bit deeper. The relationships among the characters (particularly the main two) are great, but not strong enough to seem believable. Simply, there is not enough chemistry between any of them. I appreciate that the author attempted to write dialogue that seems a little bit more like how Black and Latine teenagers would speak, but it came off as a little awkward and unrealistic at times. 

The other points of view that were added into the story were interesting, but they did not really add much to the overall story, so I felt like the book could have gone without them. I liked that those different POVs showed how all these different characters were connected one way or another, and they also showed how other people were affected by the rules of this world Silvera created. But it just didn't really do much for the overall plot. If anything, if Silvera didn't add them to the story, he could have spent that time focusing on building the relationship between the main characters a bit more, rather than introducing a bunch of characters that we won't get to know all that well.

It was a good book, but it didn't really make me feel anything for any of the characters or the situation they were going through. A lot of people swear that this is one of the saddest books they've ever read, and it just simply did not evoke any emotion in me. It's a shame, because the overall idea behind the book is very interesting, but just not enough for me to ever want to read this book again.