I know, I didn’t like the first book, so why did I read the second? Because I liked the first half of the first book, and the concept of this book was too irresistible.
This one had whole other issues going on to make it skeevy beyond watching people through the walls. But it’s still also a little bit the same? Because the MC sounds like she’s twelve. Not kidding, she’s all daddy and mommy and everyone calls her little mountain girl. You can tell me she was seventeen here, but it never showed a seventeen year old. It showed an at mosttwelve-year-old. Then it’s three years later and she’s calling her vagina a kitty (because she thinks that’s what it’s called, so I assume a misremembered pussy reference) and has never heard the word cøck. Though apparently she’s watched pørn, though I have no idea how as she had no mobile phone or computer or internet, just a landline as nothing else got reception where she lives. I think the inability to communicate and using gestures for everything didn’t help with ageing her up either, because she just reads so freaking young.
It’s super weird and icky because then she’s watching these guys through the walls and self-pleasuring, and again, she sounds twelve. And maybe she stopped maturing once she was alone with no one else to interact with and she’s now fifteenish and just developmentally delayed and really naive. But she’s apparently twenty. Then four guys go straight to being sexual with her and it really feels like they’re taking advantage of someone with a cognitive disability and it just feels so gross and abusive when she doesn’t possess the brain power to say no. Like when you were watching the Descendants and found out Dopey from Snow White has kids. There is no way that was consensual with someone who understood what was going on. So yeah, not at all sexy.
The flashbacks really break the story too. They add nothing beyond word count. If the characters have a back story, use it to show me how it affects them, don’t just tell us.
The end is quite abrupt and basically does a full turn around before setting up for a new book. This one can definitely be read as a standalone as it’s just the same world without crossover.