Ask the Passengers

Tess, a teenage girl and former sex worker, and a man with a dark past are forced together on a train ride to a remote town, and the story is told through alternating first-person POVs — this structure and the unreliable/fragmented narration justify the unreliable-narrator and multiple-povs tropes. The book is a gritty, morally ambiguous coming-of-age story about a girl who has been exploited and abused and a man who has been a victim himself, so morally-grey and dark-and-gritty fit the tone better than a generic YA romance tag. The moods are tense and dark given the subject matter (trafficking, abuse), but also hopeful and reflective as the characters confront their pasts. No romance or revenge plotlines are the load-bearing tropes here — the book is a character-driven redemption arc rather than a genre-driven plot, so I kept the trope list minimal and accurate rather than over-tagging.