pine island projects

Oh, Bear Season. I wanted so badly to love this book and I did not.
I already wrote a bit about my disappointment that Jade's thesis was not, in fact, in the form of a thesis or a diary or stream-of-consciousness but was 99% normal prose? Like, come on.
When I started getting really into found fiction, the phrase that came to me was "fidelity to form." It was (is) important to me that I mimic the chosen format as closely as possible. In my case, that's often at the expense of, uh, characters or plot - which is something I need to work on! It's a complicated balancing act but I was really bummed out that Gemma Fairclough didn't even try to write a pretend thesis or even a real investigative journalism piece. (It's hard! I've started fiddling around with a pretend undergrad research paper and even that is a lot of work!)
The whole book felt underbaked. The unsolved mystery at the end was very obvious and the stuff about ( spoilers ) felt very rushed. There was a throwaway paragraph about otherkin believing that Jade really did turn into a bear but that felt like the author just wanted us to know, hey, she's aware that therianthropes exist; it didn't serve the story at all and there was nothing interesting or insightful that Gemma Fairclough couldn't've learned about either community from a quick search, so why even bother? (I'm not otherkin but there's a non-zero overlap between otherkin and soulbonders so I'm familiar with the community.)
This book was such a bummer.