The Rush: Chapters 5 – The End

I made it to the end of this novel!

#finally

As you might remember from my last post, or the post before that, I have not been particularly enjoying this novel. It only got worse as I kept reading, however reader (except for a brief respite near the end, which I will discuss more later).

The Rush: So bad, it made Santa’s naughty list.

Basically, this entire novel can be summarized into one word: indecision.

Ivy can’t decide how she feels about Ryder, or rather, won’t be honest with herself about her feelings, and generally, can’t decide how she feels about anything else, either. She gets tattoos out of rebellion, but they really only stress her out and act as a weird, spit-filled bonding moment with the boy she’s crushing on whom she won’t admit she has a crush.

#flirting

Ivy can’t decide whether or not she has an eating disorder. She blames her mother for forcing her to “barely eat anything,” but she gets caramel macchiatos every two seconds. Wouldn’t someone with an eating disorder be aware of the large amount of calories in the delicious, but fatty caramel macchiato? Or if her mother doesn’t let her eat anything, wouldn’t her mother ban the drinking of them? Also, what kind of rebellious teen willfully gets tattoos (ignoring the indecisiveness factor) but isn’t willing to rebel against eating dictates and get a salad at lunchtime?

#notbuyingit

The scene where she tells everything to Ryder is hilarious. She literally contradicts herself every other sentence. Not necessarily the things she’s saying to Ryder, the things she’s thinking to herself. At one point, she says something along the lines of “For the first time in my life, I felt absolutely disgusted with my life.” But, um, she’s literally been complaining about how disgusting her life is at least once (usually more) in every preceding chapter.

 

The redeeming factor I mentioned earlier? Ivy’s date, mandated by Nyx, is scary. My pulse quickened, I internally screamed at the protagonist to get out of the situation, knowing that 16-year-old-girls can get themselves in abusive date situations like this easily and feel that they need to stay.

Having said that, one scary date chapter is certainly not intriguing enough to convince me to continue with the sequel.

Those are my thoughts. What are yours? Have you read The Rush? Are you planning to (possibly during a Goodreads 2016 challenge)?

Spit take: by Leo Marz (catálogo de SPACES Leo Marz) [FAL], via Wikimedia Commons

The shrug: http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/db/bd/12d6e1df5dfb1b135a8b32ccff99.jpg