The second book to ever make me cry.

As I do with any book I'm considering giving 5 stars, I spent hours ruminating on this, looking for reasonable qualms. Anything I could think of had a stronger counterargument. Truly, my only nitpick is a stylistic choice: when characters interject "like" as a filler word, there was always a comma after "like," but not always before. (e.g. " Yeah, he's, like, Dodge Truck Month level straight. I'm not wasting my time. " vs. " Yeah, he's like, Dodge Truck Month level straight. I'm not wasting my time.") Otherwise, I think the plot was wonderfully paced, the narrative shape clever, the character building intelligent and phenomenal, the dialogue excellent and true to the various age groups (without being overly cringe-worthy, with regards to the teenagers' dialogue).

The author's note resonates succinctly with my feelings on the book: queer folks (Southern US queer folks, BIPOC queer folks--all queer folks) deserve and need saccharine, melodramatic rom-coms. Global cinema is oversaturated with contrived heterosexual rom-coms--queer folks don't have the same access to the luxury of indulgence in the genre.

So, if queer YA rom-coms aren't your thing, this book probably won't be your cup of tea. That's fine.

If queer YA is your thing and you're picking up this book--you're in for a treat. Especially if you're a queer person from the southern states (or a place like False Beach). Get ready for melodramatic, contemporary teenagers, a mean girl's manufactured mystery, and so much beautiful, meaningful representation.

That's the review. Below is an address of a few gripes I've encountered several times for this book and find unreasonable.



As can be expected with any review aggregator site, there are some absolutely foul, unreasonable, and/or laughable takes in some of the reviews. I didn't see many (but still too much) reviews like this, but those unjustly bring the overall score down. My two cents on a few things:

Annoying/unlikable characters: Those who are saying Chloe is annoying, that other teenagers in the book are annoying (to the point where it made people score the book worse)...they're teenagers. What did you expect? How many teenagers are completely nonabrasive, especially in (a religious!) high school? Teenagers get hung up on trivial matters. Teenagers say iconic shit sometimes. They also say cringe-worthy shit. McQuiston's character building here retained that authentic reality. It's a testament to their prowess as an author in their niches (queer YA and queer NA from what I've seen). That's not an indicator of a bad book or bad writing.

It's a "Mean Girls" wannabe: Did we read the same book? Not everything that portrays high school well is a "Mean Girls" rip-off. Knock it off.

"Unrealistic" amount of queerness: Ope, babe, your casual queerphobia + heteronormativity is showing @ anyone who complained about this. I feel like anyone who asserted that the amount of queerness present at Willowgrove is "unrealistic" has, somehow in 2024, never heard of the common phenomenon of entire high school friend groups turning out to be queer. It starts with a Chloe, with "that one nonbinary kid," with "that gay guy," etc. and, 3-15 years later, the queer folks observe their high school companions and classmates and realize, "Wow, we've got enough gays for at least 10 rainbows here."

Ending was "easy" and/or "idealistic" and/or saccharine: This gripe I understand, and I used to have with books like this. Personally, I now believe there's a lot of catharsis, destimgatization, paradigm-shifting, and importance in modelling the type of queer joy displayed in endings like this one (and I think it's especially important for queer YA).
Also, I'd argue that the ending veers away from idealism in the following sense:

It's very obvious, at least to me, that several, if not most of the couples by the end probably won't make it long past high school. Chloe even intimates this, regarding her and Shara's relationship. Maybe one couple will stay together (place your bets--I'm voting for Rory/Smith personally), but the rest probably won't. And that's how it goes in reality.