I rewrote my old post.
In short, I must say right away, I live in Russia and this book was published only in Russian. It is not available in other languages. Do you understand? Good.
This book is about LGBT relationships and was published before the LGBT ban in Russia.
In the world of the book, when a person dies, he becomes a ghost. They are invisible to humans, but they also need to eat and sleep, and can interact with objects. Also, the only ones who see them are soulmates and now they need to be "saved" from something, then the ghost will become a human again, but 40 days are allotted for this.
It sounds quite interesting, but the author does not reveal it very well. For example, the fact that ghosts need to sleep and eating there is no point. This will not play into the plot in any way.
The story tells about Daan, a gay boy who kills himself after a quarrel with his mother and becomes a ghost. His soulmate turns out to be a guy named Alexis, who refused to date him a year ago and humiliated him in front of the whole school.
To begin with, everyone here hates gays, literally everyone, even the main characters hate themselves. And this is in the Netherlands, the country that was the first to legalize same-sex marriage and the book's actions take place in the modern world, if anything. And the funny thing is that this is the only thing I remember from the plot, because most of the time nothing interesting happens, and what happens feels too pretentious. That's why I don't really have anything to say about him.
The characters are terrible. Most of them are just extras, others are cartoonishly evil.
Daan is no character at all. He's gay and he's always whining. This is literally his whole trait, being gay and whining, he won't change in any way over the course of history.
Alexis is a bastard. We should empathize with him, feel sorry for him, but he causes only one hatred. When his sister finds his diary, where he admits that he is gay and they have a quarrel, he says: "Do you think all gays are monsters?!"and then a couple of pages later, when his teacher is being bullied, he laughs maniacally, and then says that he would have done worse to her. He steals money, he doesn't care about his father's weak heart and runs away from home, as well as when one girl from his school jokingly said: "Аre you gay for?" He punched her in the face. And the author says that we should worry about him, that he is a hero.
And the relationship between the two of them is terrible. They are toxic, and after one "sad" scene, they already love each other.
The author's writing style is bad. This is graphomania. Most of the text is Daan's "philosophical" thoughts. And one was repeated on the same page. And most of these thoughts are very stupid and hackneyed (from the category of "I'm 14 and it's deep"). The descriptions are bad. They're too dry.
It's a terrible book. It has a forgettable plot, terrible characters, and a bad writing style. I am glad that this book has not been translated into other languages.
by mystery5009