This is, in fact, a quiet residential neighborhood. Lean far enough to see down a nearby side street, and the picture changes completely. But it doesn’t take much to see this isn’t all there is to the neighborhood. Even Adeline itself looks pretty wide right here, and a tiny triangle of blacktop at the corner, designed to stop traffic accidents, often serves as a parking lot for the equipment PG&E has been using to replace nearby gas lines for the past six months or so. Next door, Allied Fluid Products makes a variety of gaskets, hoses, tubing and pumps. The building they purchased here, between 53rd and 54th streets, which used to be a furniture repair shop and has been vacant for years, is covered in murals and cartoons. Sorry, not for me, but I literally don’t understand why this book has been hyped up so much, it’s extremely problematic with the depiction of an extremely toxic relationship.If you stand at exactly the right spot on Adeline Street, on Oakland’s northern border, you can see how CloudKitchens might have made a mistake. The length was too long, the weird coincidence that she’s in her grandmothers house and her grandmother also had a stalker didn’t do it for me, the sexual assault was too much and the attempt to redeem his sorry ass with the fact that he has this vigilante job just wasn’t enough.

Hell, he technically rapes Adeline with a gun in the first like quarter of the book. But the fact that Zade is trying to be redeemed as a good person through his stance and what he does, is also problematic. Mostly because Zade had begun showing Adeline into his world of what he does and she MAGICALLY had all these feelings about how terrible the upper class was and how sex trafficking was terrible etc.

Once Adeline and Zade saw each other face to face and started reacting outside of the “cat and mouse” game they had going, I gave up.

I stopped reading this at about the 52% mark. Second, it was just highly problematic in the relationship between the two main characters.Īdeline first of all was extremely flat to me as a character, and then Zade, although apparently being a government hacker and helping take down sex trafficking rings, doesn’t redeem the fact that he’s stalked Adeline, broken into her house, sexually assaulted her and continuously pursues her after she’s told him she’s not interested. This didn’t deserve that, this book first of all, was way too long for what it was. I usually take breaks or take them time to slow down and really try and give it a proper try, but my goodness.

Haunting adeline