The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

Well, first of all, what I really loved was how this book was focused on family and friends and not romantic relationships. While reading I was afraid maybe the author would cross the line and make the friendships in this book turn into relationships, but, thankfully, I was proved wrong. And that's a message for all YA authors out there; a male character and a female character that are best friends don't have to turn into a couple!! As for the writing, it was the perfect combination between lyrically gorgeous quotes and the realistic depiction of young-people slang. That is why I wasn't frustrated by Sam and Sal's text messages, since they were normal fragments of a story following their day to day life. They weren't taking up a big part of the book and it was clear that they were realistically showing how teenagers keep their messages short via texting. It was clear through Sal's 1st person story that the poetic writing was Sal's way of thinking and saying things and I didn't think it contradicted the way he spoke through texting, since teenagers do write both casually via text and lyrically when expressing themselves. Also, I found the characters to be very well fleshed-out and realistic. Especially, Sal, whose "life-crisis'' was very relatable. A teenager who suddenly questions themselves and their path and aren't certain whether the personality they have formed and put out in the world is 100% themselves truly feels relatable. As for some things a lot of people found problematic about this book: I did read a lot of reviews that put me into deep thinking. As I see it most of those problematic aspects circle around Sam's character. The fact that a character in a book can have problematic/toxic ''opinions'' doesn't mean that those statements express the author themselves or that we should blame the author. I believe that it is possible to spot when the author himself is expressing his toxic opinions through his characters and when the characters are just, you know, bad people. In this case, I think the problem was Sam herself, who I think of as an unlikeable, anti-feminist, toxic character that I could've never got along with in real life. However, if anything that is realistic and writing unlikeable characters isn't a thing to avoid as long as said character isn't used to support the author's toxic opinions, something that I don't think happened here. That is why I didn't find the book problematic.