Blurb:
What if everything you set yourself up to be was wrong?
Frances is a study machine with one goal. Nothing will stand in her way; not friends, not a guilty secret – not even the person she is on the inside. Then Frances meets Aled, and for the first time she’s unafraid to be herself.
So wen the fragile trust between them is broken, Frances is caught between who she was and who she longs to be. Now Frances knows that she has to confront her past. To confess why Carys disappeared…
Frances is going to need ever bit of courage that she has.
Rating: 4/5 stars
Side Notes:
- Genres: Fiction
- Highly recommend for 13 years and above
- TW: suicide ideation, depression, emotional abuse, animal cruelty, and explicit language
- LGBTQ+ Romance
Book Quotes:
- “I wonder- if nobody is listening to my voice, am I making any sound at all?”
- “Everyone’s different inside their head.”
- “I wonder sometimes whether you’ve exploded already, like a star, and what I’m seeing you is three million years into the past, and you’re not here anyore. How can we be together here, now, when you are so far away. When you are so far ago? I’m shouting so loudly, but you never turn around to see me. Perhaps it is I who have already exploded. Either way, we are going to bring beautiful things into the universe.”
- “I wish I could be as subtle and beautiful. All I know how to do is scream.”
- “Being clever was, after all, my primary source of self-esteem. I’m a very sad person, in all senses of the word, but at least I was going to get into university.”
- “I think everyone’s a bit bored with boy-girl romances anyway,” he said. “I think the world’s had enough of those, to be honest.”
- “Everything’s better under the stars, I suppose. If we get another life after we die, I’ll meet you there, old sport…”
- “I couldn’t quite believe how much I seriously loved Aled Last, even if it wasn’t in the ideal way that would make it socially acceptable for us to live together until we die.”
- “He smiled and looked away. ‘Sometimes I think we’re the same person…but we just got accidentally split into two before we were born.”
- “People move on quicker than I can comprehend. People forget you within days, they take new pictures to put on Facebook and they don’t read your messages. They keep on moving forward and shove you to the side because you make more mistakes than you should.”
- “It must be useful to be smart,” she said and then laughed weakly. She glanced down and suddenly looked very sad. “I’m like, constantly scared I’m going to be a homeless or something. I wish our whole lives didn’t have to depend on our grades.”
- “You’re an idiot,’ said Mum, when I relayed to her the entire situation on Wednesday. ‘Not an unintelligent idiot, but a sort of naive idiot who manages to fall into a difficult situation and then can’t get out out of it because she’s too awkward.”
- “Sometimes i think if nobody spoke to me, i’d never speak again.”
- “…it felt like we were friends. Friends who barely knew anything about each other except the other’s most private secret.”
- “I stopped speaking. There was no point trying to argue. There was no way she was going to even attempt to listen to me. They never do, do they? They never even try to listen to you.”
- “Bedrooms are windows to the soul.”
- “I can take a little beating now and then. I’m a tough one. I’m a star. I’m steel-chested and diamond-eyed. Cyborgs live and then they break, but I’ll never break. Even when my bone dust drifts over the City walls, I’ll be living and I’ll be flying, and I will wave and laugh.”
- “Every time I thought I’d worked out what I really enjoyed, I started to second-guess myself. Maybe I just didn’t enjoy anything anymore.”
- “You probably think Aled Last and I are going to fall in love or something. Since he is a boy and I am a girl. I just wanted to say- we don’t. That’s all.”
- “I don’t think age has much to do with adulthood.”
- “I got four A grades […] I expected to be happy about it. I expected to be jumping up and down and crying from joy. But I didn’t feel any of that. It just wasn’t disappointment.”