She should sleep in her own bed and learn to cope. I did not agree with how he raised his 8 year old sister but that may be on me (she sleeps in someone's bed all the time, where she wants, and throws tantrums because he slept out of the house once.

His relationship to his responsibility is strange because he seems to want it but also feels trapped and acts like a baby. It was difficult to keep the siblings straight, I think he has 5 but maybe more. His parents are both in jail and he is the guardian of 2 of his siblings.

Also about halfway through he goes through a personality transplant but I'll get back to that in the spoiler section. Yes Ryan did not advocate enough for what he wanted in the relationship but is that really Henry's fault? We learn about Ryan's trauma slowly (even though most could have been guessed) which made it difficult to understand him. That last fact is unclear because seemingly they had an open relationship (that Ryan agreed to but did not want) so the 'cheating' is debatable even though it is presented as such several times. For example, the ex is Henry and at first one may think that Henry was abusive, that their relationship was co-dependent (it kind of was) and that Henry cheated. At first we don't know why (despite the massive info-dumps) because Ryan is an unreliable narrator, he contradicts himself a lot. Recap: Ryan is a 23/24 year old (I think) who at the beginning of the book is living with his mom after breaking up with his ex and having dropped his porn career. We don't see much in this book but boy are we told a lot. A lot of major scenes take place off page and are then recapped, which to me is tantamount to info-dumping to me. Nothing triggered that memory, the author just thought 'oh I've forgotten to explain that, let's do that now'. In chap 23 we learned something important about Ryan's backstory through his internal monologue and it came unprompted. I mean we had still info-dumps in chap23 out of 27 chapters. Then the info-dumping was massive and non-ending. First I would point out that they are both young (not the age group I prefer to read about) but that is not enough for me to explain how emotional volatile they both are. Before moving on the spoiler section in which I will rant in detail about what did not work, let's recap.

This is a new to me author (and one I won't pick up again) and one of those cases in which I wish I had DNFed because this did not work for me at all and all the way through.

Breathe by Sophia Soames