I need to stop letting the fabulous hair on the covers on Lauren DeStefano's books sidetrack me. This had happened twice already. 
 I figured since I just started Perfect Ruin, like an idiot, I should get down my thoughts on this book. 
 Well. This book is...pretty. I suppose. In a weird, Hunger Games sort of way. 
 I-I... I can't muster up any emotions about this book. I mean, I'm not continuing the series anytime soon. 
 This book is a fashion week runway show, with about as much plot, character, or action. It's three teenage girls forced into a mansion-shaped cage and married to a twenty-something before they all will eventually die of a human plague ending lives at the ages of twenty and twenty-five, respectively. Why can men live longer? The fuck if I know. The fuck if it's ever explained. 
 Our main character is basically a blank screen through which we view the world, without bias or point of view, so we really could have had a story with an omniscient narrator without losing anything because we have no personality flavoring the entire story. Why do we have it in first person? Are we learning anything more about the character? What does her stream of consciousness bring? Nothing. NOTHING. 
 She is kidnapped in an arranged marriage, dragged into this weird, wife-purchasing brothel and sold with two other girls, the rest of the roomful shot to death in the first chapter. With barely a whimper out of her. Her new husband will probably rape her after her wedding. She sulks. That's it. We get no emotion out of her. She is another porcelain-faced, dead-eyed protagonist that lies there like a ragdoll while shit happens around her limp body. 
 This book is dark, but when our narrator is a bland and uncaring about the many deaths and other terrible instances, we can't bring ourselves to care because she is just as bored with her family, friends, and love interest. We need to see her reaction about a man killing his grandchild, because when she doesn't respond in any way, we assume it's not a big deal. The most she feels is grossed out. And rightfully so. This world is gross. Lots of old men leering, twenty-one year olds sleeping with thirteen year-olds, child brides, teen pregnancy, sugar daddies. Women are objects in this world and while it's portrayed horrifically, nothing is done about it. No statement is made. No point driven across. Just these horrible circumstances that have all these really horrible underlying meanings, but we are given nothing beyond "sucks to suck. Kaysorrybyeee" 
 Yeah, if a spoiled, horrible thirteen-year-old teen mom is something you don't want to deal with, don't read this book. She is awful, and every cheaply redeemed in the end. There is very little friendship in the sister wives. They're contained in one floor of the house for most of the book, and we know very little about them. It never felt like friendship, even if in the narrative they were supposed to be friends. Even as one is dying in front of the other, she's begging the protagonist to escape while there's a meaningful distraction. She stays. Of course. Like a fucking moron. 
 You can do a lot better than reading this book is the long and short of it. You'll be grossed out or bored, maybe entertained by some descriptions of dresses or parties, but it's three teenage girl trapped in a house with an idiot husband and a creepy old man. No action, no attitude, no personality. It's all the excitement of watching animals in an aquarium; a layer of glass exists between the audience and its entertainment. No connection, no contact, and you go home and go on with your life and forget about what you witnessed.