I enjoyed the story by the end. The character development was good. I do feel that the pacing was a little slow. But overall a good book.

The beginning of this book dragged for me. I thought about DNFing it at about 25%, but decided to stick it out in case it got better - which it did, if not entirely so. The main thing that bothers me about this book is that I really dislike Tony as a person, particularly because he's misogynistic and kind of racist. I really don't feel like we needed those characterizations to establish Tony as a flawed character because the entire book is about his other (myriad) flaws. It was incredibly difficult to want to root for him because of this, especially before we get the rest of his backstory. I understand that this is intentional, but I could not bring myself to like him as an adult. I also thought his jokes were absolutely awful and I did not understand why everyone around him (particularly women) were falling over themselves laughing at his terrible puns. Also, the backwards structure of the narrative, though interesting, often made it so that Tony was repeating things that we already knew because he had said them in previous chapters, which got old pretty quickly. That being said, I did think this book picked up in the second half as we got farther into Tony's backstory, and I liked the ending. I can't say I totally enjoyed reading this book, but it had its moments.

4⭐️

[a copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher from netgalley. thank you!]

a well-written book with great character development