Almost Honest

Almost Honest tackles some genuinely heavy stuff without ever feeling preachy or heavy-handed. The book opens with a content warning about grief, suicide loss, and academic pressure, and the author actually delivers on exploring those themes meaningfully. Prin's guilt about her mother's death and the way she carries that into her relationships, especially with Zara (whose sister died and who Prin feels responsible for), creates this undercurrent of pain that makes her character feel three-dimensional. The fact that she thinks "maybe not everything I touched ended in death" after saving Rosa's life shows how much she's been carrying that weight.