Title: Slingshot

Author: Mercedes Helnwein

Pub. Date: April 27, 2021

Pages: 352

Pub: Wednesday Books

Genre: YA Contemporary Romance

Rating: DNF @ 5% / ⭐️

Goodreads

---

An exciting debut contemporary young adult novel perfect for fans of Rainbow Rowell and Mary H. K. Choi

Grace Welles had resigned herself to the particular loneliness of being fifteen and stuck at a third-tier boarding school in the swamps of Florida, when she accidentally saves the new kid in her class from being beat up. With a single aim of a slingshot, the monotonous mathematics of her life are obliterated forever…because now there is this boy she never asked for. Wade Scholfield.

With Wade, Grace discovers a new way to exist. School rules are optional, life is bizarrely perfect, and conversations about wormholes can lead to make-out sessions that disrupt any logical stream of thoughts.

So why does Grace crush Wade’s heart into a million tiny pieces? And what are her options when she finally realizes that 1. The universe doesn’t revolve around her, and 2. Wade has been hiding a dark secret. Is Grace the only person unhinged enough to save him?

Acidly funny and compulsively readable, Mercedes Helnwein’s debut novel Slingshot is a story about two people finding each other and then screwing it all up. See also: soulmate, friendship, stupidity, sex, bad poetry, and all the indignities of being in love for the first time.

---

This will be a short, spoiler free review. Thank you to NetGalley and Wednesday Books for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Y’all I wanted to like this one.

When the NG widget hit my inbox, I got really excited. It sounded so cute, and we all know that I’ve been loving YA contemporary lately.

Pretty much by page 2 I was not interested – I do not like illegal relationships – even if they’re 100% one sided and basically created by one person. They make me feel gross, and I can’t even imagine being attracted to a teacher. So that’s a huge strike against this book, for me.

I also completely missed the fact that the MC is 15. That was so long ago for me, I legit cannot relate, and I don’t really like young MC’s. Though, she doesn’t act 15. She acts like an incredibly jaded and vulgar adult and I did not like her.

I can’t express that enough.

The MC is terrible. She’s a brat. She’s mean. She’s fucking judgmental as hell (which might be the most accurate thing about her designated age). She’s just so incredibly annoying and above it all – and that’s only in the first 5% of this book.

The way she describes people – treats people. Her description of her own mother is nothing but an attack under the guise of “well she’s pretty, but crazy”.

I really hope I wasn’t this much of a fucking asshole at 15. My parents would have whooped my ass for behaving the way she does.

At this point I had to pause, and I went to Goodreads. I wasn’t enjoying myself and I needed to find out if it was worth reading on.

Clearly it wasn’t.

I tried though. I did try to give it a fair chance, but I just found the MC to be so unlikeable, I couldn’t bear it.

There’s also a bunch of weird language choices – all in the effort to make the 15-year-old MC seem older, jaded and again, above it all. Woe is her. I wasn’t a fan of the writing style either, and it just wasn’t worth forcing myself to read through it. The analogies were everywhere, and there were strange descriptive choices as well.

I’m bummed that this was a miss for me.

I would recommend checking out some other reviews for this before diving in. I don’t think I’m missing much by DNFing this book, unfortunately.