… More like their guide to dealing with fake friends and communication issues 👀
To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before but sapphic and centering two Bengali girls!
Hani needs to find a girl to date to “prove” to her friends that she’s bi, and Ishu needs a popularity boost in order to become Head Girl… 🤝 Enter: the mutually beneficial fake-dating pact, with plenty of rules and boundaries to define their strictly business relationship… but we all know how the fake dating trope ends 😉.
Given that I’m not a huge fan of YA contemporary stories about high schoolers or the fake dating trope, I’m pretty sure I’m not the target audience, so take my opinion with a grain of salt 🤷🏻♀️. I really liked how this book covered so many important topics and explored the experiences of queer people of color! The characters tended to come across as very trope-y, however, and their development was limited in order to further the romance, which left a lot of the characters and their dynamics unexplored and made the pacing odd at times. I still had a lot of fun reading this though and thoroughly enjoyed the cute heart-fluttering moments of these two awkward sapphic simps 😚.
Things I liked ✅
Things I disliked ❌
This succinct summary of my questioning/acceptance period 😅:
“Sometimes I think that maybe I like guys more as a concept than a reality. And girls more as a reality than a concept.”