After many, many years of entering Goodreads Giveaways, I have finally won! I really was starting to believe it would never happen to me, and I was really glad it was an ARC of What I Like About You by Marisa Kanter, a book I heard about many months before on Twitter. I was drawn in by the description of the book as being about a girl named Kels, a book blogger who likes to bake, as I am a girl named Kels, a hobby book blogger who likes to bake. Throw in a romance and I was really excited to get to a chance to read it.
Halle Levitt is a YA book blogger-she runs a blog called One True Pastry, where she reviews books and pairs covers with cupcakes. She has built a brand and a life online as Kels, complete with group chats and a best friend, Nash, who has an ongoing online comic. She likes keeping her personal life separate from her online life, until she moves in with her grandfather and ends up at the same school as Nash. Thus begins what I can only describe as an outrageous catfishing tale.
I really wanted to love this book, but I didn’t end up enjoying it as much as I thought I would. There were some parts I really liked! Halle and her family are Jewish, as well as several other characters, and there are a lot of Jewish traditions and holidays sprinkled throughout the book. I think that it handled grief really well, and showed how different people deal with grief. I really liked Halle’s younger brother, Ollie, and I wish we had gotten to see more of his life other than occasional updates when Halle remembered to care about what was going on with him. It also seemed like a good depiction of how much work it takes to maintain a book blog and a book Instagram, especially when one is hoping to make a career out of it.
Besides those things, most of the book fell flat for me. The romance had potential to be cute, but Halle hides the truth about Kels for almost an entire school year, including at least several weeks after she entered a relationship with Nash. The reader also finds out that not only is Halle lying to Nash, but she’s been lying to him as Kels as well. She hasn’t told him anything true about her family, or where she lives, which is why he’s unable to recognize anything in her life when they meet. There was little buildup to their irl relationship as well. For the first part of the book, Halle would be nice to Nash and then incredibly mean when she remembered that she was trying to keep him for Kels, and she kept writing this off as being socially awkward instead of a deliberate choice she was making to act this way. They had one or two cute moments before getting together, and I might have been able to be more invested in it if it were not for the catfishing, and how long Halle lets it go on.
But what I find worse than Halle’s catfishing, from a storytelling standpoint, is that Nash is completely oblivious to the fact that Kels is hiding something. I used to watch a lot of MTV’s Catfish-and I mean a lot-so I know that people can be blind to things that are obvious to everyone else, but usually the person involved is aware enough to know that something is off. Nash has no such awareness. He’s been best friends with Kels for three years and has never seen a single picture of her. Not even a snapchat! She is cagey every time he asks to meet up with her, they’ve obviously never video chatted, or sent each other postcards or anything because they don’t know where each other lives. All of this seems incredibly unrealistic to me! I know that romance books often require some suspension of disbelief but someone in his life should have been emailing Nev and Max.
One of the biggest blogging plot points was when an author made a few comments about not considering her books to be only for teens, and loving her teen readers but hoping adults liked her books, too. Everyone in the book had a weird hangup about adults reading YA, and the character reactions seemed out of proportion with what was actually said. This, at least, is an incredibly realistic depiction of online discourse. Much is made about whether or not Kels will see the movie adaptation of the book written by the aforementioned author, but…I just did not care! As I said, it seemed like an overreaction to the actual comments.
I’m struggling a bit with how to rate this. I feel a lot stronger about the things I didn’t like than the things I did like, but it’s easy to read and there are cute moments. The Jewish rep is important and seemed well done to me. I think the general premise has potential to be really interesting, but I just can’t get over the extent of the lying or Nash’s complete obliviousness to it. However, if a love triangle that’s actually a line and a look into the life of a teen book blogger interest you then I think it’s worth a read, even if your complete disbelief and sometimes rage at the actions of the main character is what fuels you to finish it.
I Haven't Read That Yet 