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A review by weweresotired
All You Never Wanted by Adele Griffin
2.0
See the full review at Short & Sweet Reviews.
Ever read a book where you finish it and realize you have absolutely no sympathy for any of the characters? Even if you should? That's how I felt about Alex and Thea in All You Never Wanted. These are girls who are handed everything they could ever want, thanks to their new, wealthy step-father. On the surface, their lives look easy, but problems lurk underneath the surface, making their lives anything but the fairy-tale stories that they appear to be. Alex is popular and pretty and has opportunities given to her right and left, but is also dealing with a pretty debilitating anxiety disorder. Thea, her younger sister, used to be kind of nerdy and bookish, but as Alex declines, Thea sees a way to climb her way to the top, inventing a new, devious persona to escape her less-than-cool past and get what she wants.
Both of our narrators here are very unreliable, Thea especially. It's established early on that she's manipulative and a liar, willing to do anything to climb the social ladder. So it's easy to question everything she does, right up until the closing pages of the book. I don't have anything against unreliable narrators -- it's an interesting technique that keeps a reader on their toes if done well -- but Thea was so absolutely unsympathetic of a character that I lost interest in trying to wade through her lies very early on. By the end, there was a large part of me that just didn't care what happened to Thea. I just wanted Alex to get out of all of her dysfunctional relationships and start over.
There are a couple of moments in this book that made me stop and go "WAIT YOU'RE KIDDING ME". There's a huge insta-love thing between Alex and Xander; they share hardly any page time at all before she's realizing that she loves him and suddenly starts making drastic changes in her life. Like, it's a positive thing for Alex that helps her cope with her anxiety, but as a reader it made me want to throw things.
Ever read a book where you finish it and realize you have absolutely no sympathy for any of the characters? Even if you should? That's how I felt about Alex and Thea in All You Never Wanted. These are girls who are handed everything they could ever want, thanks to their new, wealthy step-father. On the surface, their lives look easy, but problems lurk underneath the surface, making their lives anything but the fairy-tale stories that they appear to be. Alex is popular and pretty and has opportunities given to her right and left, but is also dealing with a pretty debilitating anxiety disorder. Thea, her younger sister, used to be kind of nerdy and bookish, but as Alex declines, Thea sees a way to climb her way to the top, inventing a new, devious persona to escape her less-than-cool past and get what she wants.
Both of our narrators here are very unreliable, Thea especially. It's established early on that she's manipulative and a liar, willing to do anything to climb the social ladder. So it's easy to question everything she does, right up until the closing pages of the book. I don't have anything against unreliable narrators -- it's an interesting technique that keeps a reader on their toes if done well -- but Thea was so absolutely unsympathetic of a character that I lost interest in trying to wade through her lies very early on. By the end, there was a large part of me that just didn't care what happened to Thea. I just wanted Alex to get out of all of her dysfunctional relationships and start over.
There are a couple of moments in this book that made me stop and go "WAIT YOU'RE KIDDING ME". There's a huge insta-love thing between Alex and Xander; they share hardly any page time at all before she's realizing that she loves him and suddenly starts making drastic changes in her life. Like, it's a positive thing for Alex that helps her cope with her anxiety, but as a reader it made me want to throw things.