Hello friends, happy Friday, I hope you all had a good week! Today I’m posting my review of Saints and Misfits by: S.K. Ali.

You can read my review of the sequel: Misfit in Love

Saints and Misfits by: S.K. Ali: Janna struggles to fit in and she knows the people around her don’t know what to make of her either, especially her crush, Jeremy. While she tries to figure out who she wants to be, whether it’s a saint, a misfit or a monster, she knows a monster who pretends to be a saint. With the help of an unlikely friend, she has to make the decision to call him out or not. This novel was both fun and hard-hitting with a really good balance. The reader has read the sequel to this already and had preconceived expectations for this novel. Even though this novel wasn’t as strong as the sequel; the reader could appreciate the growth in Ali’s writing and characterization. The plot was good, it was fast-paced with a good mix of school drama that was lighter and fun to read to counterbalance the more weighted plot of sexual assault. The reader wished that there had been more talk on how to get help and finding resources instead of watching Janna fumble through it alone until the very end, when out of nowhere everyone started to believe her. The reader didn’t really like that this novel just ended; the resolution, if you can call it that, felt abrupt and unresolved. None of the plots really wrapped up, they just stopped and the reader just expected a lot more. What the reader did like was how open they talked about wearing hijab or niqab and how it was all of the character’s choice to wear what they felt comfortable with and not that they were forced into it. It read as a positive and the reader could really feel the empowerment that Ali was trying to give it. The characters felt a little two dimensional; we didn’t really get to know much about them, we just saw them on the surface in Janna’s life but they didn’t have enough substance. Janna was fun to get to know; she had multiple layers and she truly felt like a teen girl trying to figure it all out. She was flawed, yet really relatable. The reader didn’t like Tats in this book; in the sequel she’s a lot more understanding, this one she felt all over the place. One moment she was willing to defend Janna, the next she couldn’t seem to understand her and the implications that things had for her; it was really confusing to read. Overall, this was an important read, it just lacked a little.