I wanted to love this book. The premise was interesting and Amy Reed wrote one of my favorite books of 2017 - The Nowhere Girls [full review here!]. And I remembered that book took me a while to get into, so I probably gave this one more than its fair shake. Attempting to read it actually pushed my reading schedule way back, and now I'm off by a whole week and probably won't catch up without setting aside a couple of books that I hoped to read in July or August.
That's how much I wanted to love this book and tried to read it. But I just couldn't get into it.
The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World is about Billy and Lydia and two towns that hate each other but are forced together. And then there's all the supernatural stuff going on. I'm going to try to break it down, but we'll see how successful I am. Billy is from Rome, Washington, a poor little town known for one thing - the band Rainy Day Knife Fight, whose lead singer is Billy's uncle Caleb. Lydia is from Carthage, Washington, the town neighboring Rome, which is also poor and sad and only known as the setting for the book series Dragons vs. Unicorns, written by some guy who had never even been there. The Carthage schools closed, so all the Carthage kids had to move over to the Rome schools, which was causing all kinds of fighting. But Billy and Lydia, two outcasts, became unlikely friends.
And then Billy's famous uncle went missing. And then a weird tornado hit the town, and Billy and Lydia were out hiking when it struck. And then Caleb shows up in Billy's house. All the while, Billy and Lydia keep noticing that something isn't right with the town, isn't right with the fog that's rolling in... and they're starting to think that they're the only two who see it.
I DNFed at 36%.
Why I DNFed
Listen, THERE IS SO MUCH GOING ON. The set up was so complicated that I was almost a quarter of the way through by the time anything actually happened. That tornado I mentioned? The way the book is marketed makes it seem like that's the first thing that happens in the book. And it kind of is! But it doesn't happen until that 25% point, which is already more than 100 pages into the book. At the point I'm at in life, I don't have time or energy for slow-burn books like this. It's why I don't tend to read literary fiction right now, for instance. I stick to YA and romance because I like the tropes that power those genres. So honestly, it's not really this book's fault. It's not you, book. It's me.
Would I pick this up again?
Yes, for sure. I'm intending to return to it later in the year, when the big push of new releases dies down a tad. I want to know what happens, but right now, I had to move on. And I love Amy Reed's writing A LOT, so this really says nothing about that aspect of the book at all. This is more of a DNF for now than a DNF forever. And I'll write another review when I eventually finish it, because I have a feeling the end of this one could be quite the wild ride.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. I'm sorry my life is so crazy right now. I'll return to this book and update my review, I swear.
Have any of you DNFed a book because your life couldn't handle it right then? Let me know in the comments!
Happy reading!