I don't know how to feel about this one. To say it started out rough would be a severe understatement. I was one instance of second hand embarrassment away from putting this book down and never picking it back up again, but I'm always a sucker for fake dating and this book was under 300 pages, so I pushed through. It did get a little better as it went on, but I'm still shocked that it's rated as highly as it is.

To start off, this is classified as YA, and it is entirely possible that I am too old to enjoy this book, but I'm honestly not sure if teen me would have even liked this either. The writing was not very imaginative, I think the worst part of this for me, was the character descriptions. When a character is described as a "pudgy white guy" it really breaks my immersion and honestly doesn't give a lot to go off of, plus, all the character descriptions are like that, and we absolutely see some stereotyping going on here. I can usually look past character descriptions once all the main characters are introduced, and we start getting into the meat of the story, but it doesn't help when a majority of the characters are pretty annoying and/or dull. Our FMC, Riley, makes so many questionable choices and spends the entire book lying and taking advantage of her family. I appreciate that she isn't like that with her friends most of the time, but I can't say I lied to my family this much as a teenager. I mean, the whole reason this book happened is because she stole her moms car and drove to see a musical WITHOUT A LICENSE. Like come on. And then halfway through the book she's like hmmm maybe I should have asked my dad to take me. Girl, you could have killed someone. And all her parents did was ground her for a few weeks and make her work at her dad's store. Her dad, by the way, was actually really cool and didn't deserve half the treatment her got from the Riley and her mom. Yes, he wasn't perfect, but her mom was far from perfect herself, and it seemed like she was trying to turn Riley against her dad the whole time. It doesn't help that Riley goes through some mild hypocrisy too when she gets mad at her dad for not showing an interest in her hobbies when she spends the first half of the book adamantly against his, but I digress. I will say her mom does come through when she's really needed, but I still think she should have taken a step back to look at herself before placing the blame on Riley's dad. This is more of a personal complaint, but do all musical theater kids sing this much? The middle of a DnD campaign to sing a full song from a musical is not the time or the place in my opinion. Maybe all my DnD groups have been on more of the tame side when it comes to the role play part, but I very viscerally cringed every single time that happened.  

 In all honesty, the FMC isn't all bad. I appreciated how driven she was and for the most part she didn't just bail on everyone when she started having relationship problems. There was definitely a good start to a strong female lead, she was just a bit too independent for her own good. I also did really like her relationship with the MMC, I could absolutely see those two working it out long term. I also really liked all of her friends. There wasn't a lot to separate them from each other, but I still really liked that she had a supportive friend group.

Other than that, the story had its cute moments and I obviously did like some aspects of it to make it go from an almost DNF to a 3-star book. I think with some polishing and a little work on the writing, I probably would have loved this one. YA romances were always good palette cleansers for me, but I think I need to accept that they may not be my cup of tea anymore. Either way, it was cute, and I'm happy I did read it.