First of all, this is of my all-time favourite YA covers. It’s so adorable. And I’m happy to say that the story delivered. We’re following Lynda, a teenager who is devoted to getting into her dream art school. Unfortunately, her father just remarried and she now has to share a room with her stepsister, Josie. What’s worse is that her father and stepmother are willing to invest heavily in Josie’s violin lessons and education, but not in Lynda’s passion. When Josie’s little cousin breaks her drawing tablet, they don’t even offer to replace it. That’s where Angela comes in.
Angela is Lynda’s stuck-up classmate, and she has an offer for her: design the art for her otome (dating) game and Angela will pay her generously for it, including buying her a replacement tablet upfront. Lynda doesn’t have a lot of options, so she agrees. And the more they work together, the closer they become.
This is a YA romance, but it’s just as much about Lynda’s relationship with her family. She’s angry at her father, stepmother, and stepsister—and honestly, for the first half of the book, so was I. She is being treated unfairly, but she’s also not willing to see from anyone else’s perspective. That soon gets her in trouble in all her relationship. Lynda is driven and ambitious, and she has very little time for anyone who doesn’t live up to her high expectations.
That’s partly what makes her and Angela such a good match. Angela is confident to the point of seeming conceited. She’s also ambitious in the sense that while Lynda is getting commissioned for her artwork, Angela is managing a team of people to design her dream game—I don’t know about your high school experience, but that’s outside of what most teens I knew were attempting.
This is a classic hate-to-love story, and Lynda is oblivious for much of the book that she obviously has a crush. To be fair, she’s on the asexual spectrum, and it takes her a while to realize she’s attracted to Angela. (Both Lynda and Angela are bisexual and on the asexual spectrum.) I enjoyed their romance, especially because I feel like I don’t read a lot of YA where the characters start casually dating (as opposed to world-ending, star-crossed romance).
Lynda is a flawed main character. She can be selfish and judgmental, and she makes a lot of mistakes. At one point, she blows up almost all the relationships in her life. But part of her arc is realizing that everyone else is flawed and messy, too. She begins to see her father, her friends, her love interest as more complex than she initially imagined. I also liked that Josie had her own arc, and her and Lynda slowly begin to build their own dynamic with each other, including rebuilding when things fall apart. Even the secondary characters felt three dimensional, like they didn’t exist just for Lynda’s story.
I recommend this for anyone who appreciates a messy coming of age story, asexual representation in romance, flawed main characters, or otome games.
