content warnings: death of a parent, discussions of (fictional) chronic illness
representation: sapphic side characters, mlm side character, side f/f relationship

The tagline of this book is "Friendship, fandom, art, love, and finding the people you never knew you needed..." I have never seen a better description of a book in my entire life.

Friendship: This book has such a beautiful look at friendship, but also never shies away from the ugly sides of it. The main character, Sloane, enters a pre-established friend group at the start of the book, and it's really interesting to see the dynamics play out from there. I fell in love with the entire friend group at different points for different reasons. Vera was easily my favourite of them all, maybe in part because she's arguably the most focused on, but I genuinely loved them all. Seeing them interact and finding out along with Sloane things about their pasts (like their penguin party rule) was so much fun.

Fandom: Within the book, Sloane's dad (the Nicolas Sparks of this universe) is in a writing slump and becomes obsessed with the TV show Teen Wolf Were School, and very quickly becomes engrossed in the fandom to the point where he's both printing out fan-fiction to give to his daughter and writing his own. As he starts to become more obsessed, it leads to great discussions of both fandom and fan-fiction, and the way certain media can affect people.

Art: There are two main looks at art throughout the book. The first comes from Vera and Gabe's late mother, who was an artist, and Sloane and Remy spend the book trying to recover one of her final paintings that the twins' father sold. Then there's also Sloane's singing, something which she's fantastic at and has dedicated so much time and energy to throughout her life, but still sees as a sort of glorified hobby. The climax of the story mostly comes from the art in the book, and I know that's kind of a weird explanation but it's the best I've got without going into spoilers.

Love: Love of all kinds is explored throughout the book. I've already touched on friendship, so I'm going to split this section into two separate parts.

Family: The family dynamics in this were so great. Sloane and her dad's relationship was oftentimes very light and funny. They understand each other really well, and there's the previously mentioned fan-fiction situation. But there are still real moments of darkness with their relationship, particularly towards the end. Sloane's parents also have a very complicated relationship, and I wish the book had gone into it more. And then there's Sloane and her little sister, Laney, who just have a lovely relationship that reminded me a lot of Lara Jean and Kitty from TATBILB. But the look at family doesn't stop there because there's also Vera and Gabe's family. Their father remarried a woman in her early twenties, something which neither are happy with, and this is another aspect I wish would have been explored more. Then there was also their relationship with each other, which is (for the most part) a loving one. But they're very different people and that obviously leads to conflict. Overall, the look at family in this book was really nice and I appreciated the lack of absent parents.

Romance: This was easily the weakest aspect for me. I loved Vera and Natasha's cute background relationship, but Remy and Aubrey's situation (exes, but Remy's still in love with her) just gave me a headache. I appreciated that Remy was called out on his shitty attitudes, i.e. the fact that he felt entitled to know why Aubrey broke up with him and then change that about himself to win her back, but on the whole I just never really cared. Then, there's the main romance, Sloan x Someone. I didn't get it, because there seemed to be so little set-up, and I skipped all their romantic scenes.

This is a cute contemporary about friendship that had its weak aspects, but was still a really good time (the fic obsession and the twins dressing up as Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in particular gave me a good laugh), and I'll definitely be picking up some of Emma Mills' other work.