The Bones Beneath My Skin

This was a book club read and my sixth go-around with this author. Someone else in my club whose also read a lot of Klune's stuff pointed out the plot/structural similarities with his other books, and damned if I'm not gonna notice the Klune formula moving forward. But hey, he's doing something right if he keeps getting published!

This was a weird one for me because looking back at it as a whole, the first things that come to mind are the shortcomings: I wish the central romance felt a little more earned, I wish the weird/sci-fi/alien parts were leaned into more, I wish the 90's setting was better utilized, I wish the ending was more tragic (a common gripe that my book club mocks me for; I just want everything to be Hamlet-levels of tragedy). But it wasn't an overall bad book and I don't regret my time with it.

However there is a very blatant and blunt Heaven's Gate reference that was so on-the-nose that it almost felt disrespectful to me? Like, that was an actual, real-world mass suicide event; seemed weird to me to fictionalize a nearly identical version of it in an otherwise feel-good story. I don't know, just rubbed me the wrong way, enough so that I felt like mentioning it here.

I continue to not enjoy child characters in fiction, but that's subjective and nothing new. Still, I could see myself recommending this to certain people, and it's not something I would intentionally steer others away from.