Liz Buxbaum, a dress-wearing, rom-com-enjoying, eccentric teenager, constantly dreams of finding her perfect teenage romance. Perfectly for her, her childhood-crush Michael just moved back to town: Michael, the perfect, gorgeous southern-beau love-interest. The only problem is that Liz knows her only way to get closer to Michael is through a deal with her next-door neighbor and childhood rival, Wes Bennett, who put a frog in her Barbie Dreamhouse when she was a little girl. But, Wes is her ‘in’ to scoring Michael as her prom date. Soon enough, Liz will realize what love is really supposed to look like and realize she may not have been looking in the right place all along.
Honestly, I went into this book with pretty high expectations (which was my mistake entirely). I’d seen many people recommending it across multiple social media platforms as well as the Barnes and Noble employee who checked it out. I had been expecting a quick, lighthearted romance book that I was hoping to speed through in the matter of 4 days, maximum. Little did I know how much I would truly dislike the characters involved in this story. Liz is… annoying. She is selfish, constantly makes bad decisions, and sometimes her “quirks” are just so abnormal that I cannot fathom an actual teenager acting the way she does. Call me a cynic, but she was sometimes simply too weird and acted too much like a millennial in the body of a 17 year old. I would love to talk about my issues with lack of chemistry between certain characters, but I don’t want to spoil anything. On the other hand, two things I definitely appreciated about this book were the references to popular rom-coms as well as the presence of a male character that actually had an enjoyable personality. Wes was very refreshing to read about; he is very respectful when he needs to be, but obviously could be really fun when he didn’t. Altogether, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book to one of my good friends, but I am sure that there are plenty of people out there who may be the right target audience for it. If you like a YA romance and can overlook the constant poor decisions of the main character as well as some pretty annoying aspects of their personality, this may be the book for you!
-Anonymous
