I've been out of my angsty teen phase for several years now and even when I was in it I had very little patience for books about teenage angst. Which made this book really hard for me to get through. Now, I will say that Nastya's feelings are understandable once I understood what she went through, but the problem is that what happened to her was vague until a little over halfway through the book. Instead, it's mostly her complaining about school and talking about how to keep everyone from getting to close and how much she hates life, etc. That gets old pretty fast. I give up, eat half a bag of jelly beans, leaving the black ones behind because they suck, and head to the shower to wash the shit that was this day off of me. I have a riveting conversation with myself while letting the conditioner set in my hair. I talk about my crap schedule. I tell myself about the unfortunate irony that is my music class and wonder if that tops the ridiculousness of Speech & Debate...I crawl into my bed...I grabe a pen and I write. Exactly three and a half pages later, I slide the book back to its hiding place and turn off the light, wondering what fresh hell tomorrow will bring. That was about 8% of the way through and while reading it I wondered how it was possible to make eating jelly beans, taking a shower, writing a bit in a notebook, and going to bed so miserable. And unfortunately, Josh's point-of-view wasn't much happier. At least I liked Nastya much better than Josh, who just wasn't a very pleasant character and thought himself so much better than others. I guess in a lot of ways this book reminded me of [b:Speak|439288|Speak|Laurie Halse Anderson|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1310121762s/439288.jpg|118521] with the whole "I hate high school, I won't talk, here are some clues of what happened to me but I won't tell you the full story until near the end!" aspect, but [b:Speak|439288|Speak|Laurie Halse Anderson|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1310121762s/439288.jpg|118521] just worked so much better for me.
