★★½ stars ! ₊˚⊹♡

i felt like giving this book some grace by putting 4 stars, bc i rly get and appreciate what it was trying to do, but the more i think abt it the more i realize the way it was executed didnt come off quite the right way, soo im rounding down. despite all the book's talk of joy, there wasn't that much of it, with barclay's situation and behavior becoming worse and worse, leaving no room for much joy. it felt a bit suffocating and exhausting constantly having to read abt the horrible things ppl said and did to him all the time w no real consequences given for a majority of the book. idek if im making sense lol but i feel like it didn't live up to the heartstopper comparison bc this book did not feel safe like that series does. it's more abt barclay's journey, but even then i feel like he was done dirty in his own damn book! almost everyone was putting him down, even his own supposed best friend, without really trying to understand where he was coming from, while he had to understand everyone else. even i had a hard time liking him as a character near the last ~25% bc i hated how he was behaving, and like i said before it all became rlly exhausting. but i did like the political stuff (even tho it didnt rly go anywhere & im bummed we didnt get to see barclay's big reveal) and barc and christopher's relationship and romance (even if it only felt like 10% of the book), so i don't hate this at all but i wish it couldve practiced what it preached and let barclay have some more damn joy.

thank you to nttbf and simon & schuster for providing this arc i took a year to read !