"Never Have I Ever"

Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson

Pages: 337 Genre: thriller

Rating: 2 Stars

Amy Whey has worked hard for her suburban life. She has her husband, her step-daughter, their new baby, her best friend, and a job that she loves. It's everything she could have dreamed of, until Angelica Roux arrives into town one day, threatening to destroy it all if Amy can't pay up. Now, caught in a battle of wits, Amy has to face the secrets that she's worked so hard to bury. To keep them that way, she'll have to beat Roux at her own game, even if it means she might lose everything at the end.

The idea of this book — the "fighting to reveal each other's secrets" thing, which is really not how the book it pitched — was interesting. I was intrigued enough to read the whole thing pretty quickly. Unfortunately, this book was so poorly executed that it's not even worth reading. The characters are annoying, delicate topics are thrown around like they're nothing, and the ending is wildly unsatisfying. I'd say the only thing I really enjoyed was the twists, and that was more shock about how much audacity Amy had.

The most unforgivable part of this book was the character names. Words like Roux and Panda were bad enough, but I couldn't get over the character named "Tig." Is it pronounced like "twig" without a w? I thought so, until the character's full name was revealed to be Tighler. Tig-ler? Teeg-ler? ...Tyler???? And then how do you pronounce Tig? It's unacceptable.

As far as the actual story goes, Amy was a horrible person. I found it really hard to root for her. I won't spoil it, but the "big secret" she was hiding made her instantly intolerable, especially the way she acted about it. I almost stopped reading the book over it, actually. There was another reveal with Amy along the way that made her just completely irredeemable in my eyes. If this had been a book about a bad person coming to terms with what she did and trying to reconcile that with who she is now, I could've gotten behind it. But no. Spoiler alert, but Amy does not develop as a character, and she never faces any kind of consequence for anything. So what were we doing here?

Her opponent and antagonist, Roux, was just as bland. In fact, I was rooting for her throughout most of the book. Unlike Amy, Roux was at least a little interesting — I love a villain who is almost unapologetically wrong. She knew who she was, and she owned it. She was a bit of a cartoon villain: she was brilliant and almost all-knowing, until the narrative demanded her to be clueless and stupid. Now, if you've read the book and know the big reveal for her, it's worth clarifying that I did not finish the book liking her. But it seemed like the author only included that as part of her character because it's the only thing that's worse than what Amy did. "Villain-by-default" is not an engaging enough decision to base your entire narrative on.

Other than those two, the characters were very bland and unentertaining. Not even worth acknowledging in a review.

The writing itself wasn't very good either. The pacing was kind of a mess; Amy has about 4 calls-to-action throughout, but the first one doesn't happen until about 80 pages in. Amy will go over the same point multiple times (and act like it's a new thought every single time), and she's never really clear about certain details.

My biggest complaint about this book, though, was the way delicate topics were handled so uncomfortably. Spoiler alert, I guess, for the whole book, but there should be major trigger warnings for eating disorders and child abuse/pedophilia. Amy's eating disorder was written really aggressively. I'm not against a character explicitly having an eating disorder, nor do I have a problem with that character making bad choices fueled by their insecurities. But this just felt like it was fat-shaming. Amy's absolutely still dealing with disordered thoughts in present-time, but I couldn't tell if we were meant to think she was okay or not. It seemed like the implication was "she's thin, so she's better," which was definitively untrue.

Really, it just seemed like this book relished in being dark and having an edgy shock-value in the same way that an Internet troll would. It's not used in an effective way, nor does it add to the storytelling. It's just a little gross.

I can't say that I wasn't interested in the book. However, I can't suggest that anyone else read it. Even besides my issues with the characters, the writing was often repetitive and hypocritical in a way that seemed sloppy.