Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > And They Lived . . .

This book killed me. Massacred me. From swooning highs to sobbing lows, I was destroyed and remade by this book.

This book reminded me so much of what I love about Rainbow Rowell’s novels: that sweet vulnerability, the harsh truths, the blazing fire that is love, fierce friendships, great supporting characters, flawed yet extremely relatable main characters, complex familial dynamics, honest discourse on emotions and mental states, and a whole lot of absolutely beautiful prose and sentence structure.

Of course, in this book we also get some extremely lovely poetry. I honestly teared up at the poems more than once.

This book is better written than most YA romances I’ve read in the past year and has a love story that I simply adore. Our main protagonist, Chase, goes through so much in this book, and I found myself identifying with some of his struggles and feeling all the feels for him when it came to his other struggles. This book does an excellent job of helping the reader understand the concepts of body dysmorphia and identifying as nonbinary without coming across as patronizing or proselytizing, and that’s a huge relief. While a great many people need to be seriously educated on these subjects, this book keeps away from laying it on thick, which makes the whole book and its topics more accessible to the average reader.

I also really need to address the absolutely fantastic manner in which Salvatore addressed the extremely real and extremely toxic topic of body image issues in the LGBTQ community. Adolescent, teen, and young adult males are victims of eating disorders and body image issues in much larger numbers than most people suspect, and that pressure is more than doubled in much of the queer community. Again, the topic is deftly handled by Salvatore, and I’m so glad to see a YA romance novel with LGBTQ themes that also takes the time to talk about an issue not a lot of people realize is a huge problem.

I highly, highly recommend this book if you love LGBTQ romances, college romances, stories of discovering and accepting yourself, fantastic and funny supporting characters, and if you love the writing of authors like Rainbow Rowell and Casey McQuiston.

Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury YA for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review.