IT'S NOT ME, IT'S YOU

A new high school graduate in Ridgewood, New York, grapples with her future and her relationships.

Eighteen-year-old Jackie has three goals for the summer: spend as much time as possible with best friend Suzy, earn enough to buy a used car for their long-anticipated cross-country road trip, and figure out what she should do next. What she didn’t have planned was being demoted from waitressing to wearing a frog costume at work. Why was she sent to “amphibian jail”? Wilson, the annoyingly handsome new assistant manager at Monte’s Magic Castle, where Jackie helps with kids’ birthday parties, disciplined her for a minor infraction, thus becoming Jackie’s “mortal enemy” whom she takes pride in annoying. As she tries to find herself, Jackie secretly draws on her older twin sisters’ dating experiences to launch a social media account giving break-up advice; it quickly goes viral. But when she learns that her anonymous guidance has led Wilson’s girlfriend, Kenzie, to break up with him, she guiltily tries to help him win her back. Jackie’s summer soon becomes more complicated than she could have imagined. This novel told in Jackie’s first-person perspective is a leisurely enemies-to-lovers story. The light tone is entertaining, and Jackie’s growth is (refreshingly) not dependent on her male love interest; however, the dialogue feels flat and repetitive in places. Jackie and Wilson present white, Kenzie is cued Black, and Suzy is Korean and white.

A breezy, if slow-paced, teen romance with a healthy dose of self-discovery.