Like her, he feels alone in a lot of ways, like he can’t show parts of himself to the rest of the world, like he doesn’t have anyone to rely on. Um, okay, long personal rant over, let’s talk about some of the other characters.Īled Last is the shy, brilliant, anxious creator of Universe City, Frances’ favorite podcast. ![]() There’s something so powerful about seeing a character that you relate to on such a deeply personal level, which makes everything that Frances goes through feel so much more important. My attitude has always been “work hard now and it’ll all pay off and someday you’ll get to enjoy it,” but eventually the someday is going to be now and I’m going to have to figure out who I am outside of school and grades and classes, just like Frances.Īnd through this all, she feels like there’s this other side of her that nobody sees – the side that’s obsessed with an obscure little podcast and basically has zero chill. That was me in high school, and to an extent it’s me now in college. At one point she says something about how she doesn’t think she’s good at anything except school and. She’s so focused on studying and doing well in school that she often doesn’t let herself enjoy anything else, and she places much of her self-worth on her grades and test scores. really didn’t expect to relate so hard to Frances. At school, she’s head girl and always the top of her class, but at home she wears weirdly patterned leggings and draws fanart for her favorite podcast, Universe City. As such, she feels like she has two different selves that nobody really knows. “That was literally the boy-girl version of ‘no-homo,’ but I appreciate the sentiment.”įrances Janvier , the main character and narrator, is a seventeen year old bisexual, biracial, British-Ethiopian study machine who has spent much of her life aiming for the goal of going to Cambridge. So this review is going to get a little gushy and emotional. I think I went through every emotion that a human being can in the span of 400 pages, and if there was a rating higher than five stars, I would give it without hesitation. It was the book I needed when I was in high school, and it’s exactly the book I need now in college. This felt like exactly the book that I needed in my life. What was I doing in all that time that was more important than this book? Which means I’ve spend two years – TWO YEARS – just going around, living my life, while this books exists in the world and I wasn’t reading it. So this book has been out for a little over two years now. Will they have the courage to show everyone who they really are? Or will they be met with radio silence? In a world determined to shut them up, knock them down, and set them on a cookie cutter life path, Frances and Aled struggle to find their voices over the course of one life-changing year. You probably think that they are going to fall in love or something. Until she does.Frances Janvier spends most of her time studying.Įveryone knows Aled Last as that quiet boy who gets straight As. It becomes clear that something very troublesome is going on with Aled, and while Frances desperately wants to do SOMETHING to help him, she doesn’t know what to do. Aled and Frances have an argument and drift apart (or rather, Aled bails on Frances and refuses to answer her calls etc). The podcast grows in popularity, but when word gets out who is behind it, things really begin to fall apart quickly. The student goes by Radio Silence and is agender. The premise of their podcast (which Aled starts and Frances joins eventually) is a student is sending out SOS messages from a futuristic university that they’re trapped inside of. It’s not just that Aled and Frances make a podcast together (think Welcome to Night Vale)-it’s that they make a VERY popular podcast, with a large fandom, and, as creators, stay shrouded in mystery for a long time. The summary up there doesn’t do the best job of making this sound appealing (although, yes please to more books about main character best friends who seem like they might fall in love but don’t, and yes please to stories about podcasts). I wouldn’t necessarily call this a mystery, but it has elements of a mystery, and that’s what propelled me forward. ![]() BUT, once I got roped in, I got ROPED IN. I spent a few days picking it up and finding my mind wandering, so putting it down and working on something else instead. I’ll be honest: it took me a while to get into this story.
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