maiaaaa's Reviews > Solitaire

before i begin, content warnings from Alice's site:
- References to suicide and suicide attempts
- Suicidal ideation
- Self-harm
- Depression
- Eating disorders
- Obsessive-compulsive behaviours
- Narrator has implied undiagnosed depression
- Brief incidents of homophobia
- Unchallenged misogyny and ableism

now onto the review :P

let me leave one thing clear, especially if you want to read this bc you liked heartstopper:
this 👏 is 👏 not 👏 a 👏 book 👏 about 👏 happy 👏 people 👏

this doesn't mean the book is bad, it just means that if you're looking for another copy of heartstopper, you'd be disappointed. now, i liked heartstopper, but romance n such were not my favs, and after hearing an insane amount of clips from the audiobook on tiktok, and perhaps identifying with some of them, i decided to give this book a try.

i always try to not give too much away of the plot here, so "solitaire" is a new site that mysteriously appears one day and starts causing drama. tori thinks it's weird and starts investigating. on the side, tori has her social circle disturbed by new people and some she thought she knew.

for me, the most interesting part about this novel was seeing how much of charlie's problems had an impact in tori's life, all while she repeats about 24383739 times that "she's fine". i think it's very interesting to see how she's always thinking about charlie and about how her actions might affect him, like when deciding if she should go out or when she's not feeling her best (which is like 99% of the book btw).

i think everyone will feel very differently about this book based on their own experience, but in my case it just kept reminding me of sept-nov last year. i had a pretty rough time in school, and i now see how much i was thinking and acting almost like tori. personally, that made the book a lot more feel-y for me, which is why i liked it so much, but i could say that some people might find that mindset annoying, and having the narrator on it 24/7 might make them dnf the book.

it was cool, i'd probably annotate the fuck out of it, but it's in my kindle so

"'I noticed,' he says. 'But I didn't do anything. I didn't do anything.'
I have begun to cry. 'I love you anyway,'"

"'Do you want to kill yourself?' he asks, and the question sounds unreal because you never hear anyone asking that question in real life."

"I would rather be a ghost than go to heaven."

"I think a lot of people wish for disaster because it's the only thing left with the power to turn heads."

"Very cliché teenager. I disgust myself."

“Normally when I’m trying to sleep I do all these silly things, like I roll over and imagine that I’m sleeping next to someone and I reach out and caress their hair.”

"'Everything I thought about you,' I say, 'is wrong.'"

"Nice people are vulnerable because they don't know how to be mean."

"'Victoria, that is how you end up in a place like this.'"