Full disclosure, I couldn't finish the book and what pushed me to the halfway mark was the idea of just finishing, probably the worst thought while reading fiction. 
 It's was all these categorized characters that wasn't working for me - the angry and annoying teen atheist, the cold (possibly evil) beauty, the spiting relation whose inheritance was stolen by the lead which causes such hate, and the ethnic supporting role. Kudos for the author for having a half White half Chinese protagonist in an interracial relationship living in a grossly bigoted town and pointing out how messed up people can be but everything just felt forced and frankly, not very graceful. 
 I think my spider senses started tingling within the first couple chapter during which (somewhere) the author described how his the protagonist missed his favourite dish 'adobo', which is cool cause hey look how ethnically-influenced he is, but adobo is a dish with Spanish and Portuguese-origins adopted (and now basically trademark) of Filipino cuisine. The way the author described this scene, "When he heard the word home, he thought of his apartment and the house he'd lived in before his dad died. He thought of how the smell of his favorite adobo chicken would fill the kitchen when his mom made it". It's an importance scene, one that humanizes the protagonist and pulls the reader into his world so (my opinion) why wouldn't the author choose a dish more closely tied to Chinese heritage. 
 Ok that seems like a very petty scene to dwell on so I didn't. I kept reading, or kept trying to read but there were other scenes that just didn't work for me, that felt unauthentic and/poorly executed so that I just kept going back to the adobo scene and I just, I couldn't read on. 
 Maybe I should just stop reading free books. I mean, "beggars can't be choosers" but still, I just had to say my piece.