More Happy Than Not

by SILVERA

[empressbrooke]

It is a really good thing I read Adam Silvera's later books before his debut, because this book would have been enough to move him into my "never again" pile. I really loved his later books! I had fully expected to enjoy this one as well, but it was a meandering mess of mediocrity and pointlessness for the first half. I kept flipping to the synopsis that had promised sci-fi elements and wondering if I'd been lied to, because all I was getting was endless details about the playground games the characters were playing. Who needs a plot when you can fill up pages with details about hiding places and tag and skipping bottle caps into elaborately numbered game boards?

When the sci fi elements finally kicked in, they were so poorly thought through that it was ridiculous. Nothing about the rules that were created for this book follow any internal logic or consistency, and nothing tanks speculative fiction faster than that.

I wasn't really thrilled with the idea that forgetting you're gay would mean that you're straight, because it smacked of the idea that being straight is the "default" - and I know that the author is gay, and that he probably doesn't believe that, but that idea permeated the story's entire premise. The first half of the book presents the MC's feelings for and attraction to his girlfriend as 100% authentic and real, and we're supposed to buy he genuinely felt that just because he "forgot" he was gay? It would have made way more sense if the MC was bisexual and wanted to forget half of himself, and the insistence on sticking with the binary option just resulted in a confusing message.

And I was really uncomfortable with a character nicknamed "Me-Crazy" who ran around doing erratic things like rolling his eyes back until only the whites showed while screaming and punching his own head. Especially when there's a character who died by suicide and the main character attempted suicide - the book is tagged as "Mental Health" on GoodReads but my biggest takeaway was that the author saturated his book with a really insensitive and outdated idea of mental illness. There's even a random scene with a woman who gets put in a straight jacket because she's over-the-top experiencing psychotic symptoms as a result of not making progress in grief therapy after losing a loved one.

So much of this reminded me of my distaste for [b:Everything, Everything|18692431|Everything, Everything|Nicola Yoon|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1450515891l/18692431._SY75_.jpg|26540216] by [a:Nicola Yoon|7353006|Nicola Yoon|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1411143980p2/7353006.jpg] - poorly constructed and weirdly insensitive.