I'm going to give this a solid 3.5 stars with the choice to change my mind later.

There is so much packed into these pages, I feel like maybe it needed to be a little longer. Our main character is Anna, a year-11 (HS junior equivalent?) student near Sydney, Australia. Her parents are from Hong Kong; her father owns a restaurant about an hour and a half away from their home and when the novel opens, her mother is in bed. Indefinitely.

The mother's obvious bipolar disorder is evident throughout the novel, and the ways Anna and her siblings Lily and Michael are forced to deal with it are sad and desperate. Meanwhile, Anna feels like she has zero teen normalcy ... and then meets Rory while working in her dad's restaurant.

This novel is a lot about mental illness and a little about the immigrant experience with some romance thrown in. I liked that the romance wasn't the star of the show, but I did feel like I needed to know more about Rory, more about their relationship, just more in general.

It may be a "it's not you, it's me" situation. I've found that my relationship with YA is complicated and I often find myself longing to have everything a little more fleshed out.