"The Missing Piece of Charlie O'Reilly" by Rebecca K. S. Ansari

This book was really good... for the first three quarters or so, after which it rapidly devolved into crappiness. What follows is my thoughts from the first three quarters, followed by the modified versions from after it all went to pieces.

I liked how the protagonist and deuteragonist had a completely platonic friendship, despite being a boy and a girl of about the same age.

This one was true through the whole book, actually.

I liked how there was an older teenager in a middle-grade fiction book who was actually nice and helpful, rather than being aloof or a jerkface.

Make that "reformed jerkface." Turns out backstory!Jonathon was... not great.

I liked how there wasn't really any objectionable content, just some offscreen violence.

nope.

I'm pretty sure the moral of the story is going to be something about nothing being terrible enough to quit existing over.

But insteeeaaad... badly-thought-out "as long as you forgive yourself it's fine" nonsense!

I'm excited to see what cunning plan the characters use to escape the mysterious extradimensional orphanage.

But insteeeaaad... badly-thought-out "as long as you forgive yourself it's fine" nonsense!

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+, because CAN. YOU. NOT.

 

Relatedly, 1 star. The In-Between was much better.

 

(Endnote: I probably wouldn't have reviewed this at all, except that I was looking forward to doing it back during the 3/4 that were good. So, here we are.)