content warnings: hospitalised parents, violence, fatphobia, mentions of religion-related homophobia
representation: bisexual chinese-american main character, gay sikh indian-american side character, gay side character, side m/m relationship, dyslexic side character, side character with anxiety, fat side character

With the glowing praise I've seen this book get, I was expecting it to be better than a mediocre comedy. This book oftentimes gets called "She's the Man meets Pitch Perfect", but honestly I would much rather watch both those movies as opposed to ever reading this again.

A big praise I've seen this book get is the characters, in particular Jordan, which makes no sense to me because she was so aggressively bland. Though, that might be because I missed a lot of her character due to my skimming the several pages we would get every chapter that was just her internal monologue. It got so monotonous to try to read it, and a lot of what I read of them was really boring.

I'm not sure if I was meant to like Marcus and Erik, but they were both comprised of one personality trait each and I never gave a shit about them. Trav was okay, if super underdeveloped, and Isaac started out as a fun character who got incredibly generic by the end.

Jon Cox, Mama and Nihal were the only characters I genuinely liked, and I honestly would have preferred books about them.

Also, the romance, oh god, the romance was done so badly. First off, there was literally no indication that Jordan and her love interest had feelings beyond pure friendship until their faces were suddenly an inch apart, which is a trope I'm not a big fan of. But the romance also just felt like it was dominating certain scenes, and literally every single time there would be a "cute" scene between the two I would skim the entire thing.

An aspect of this book I liked was Jordan figuring out she was bi, mostly just because it was gradual and anti-climactic. But one thing I didn't like had nothing to do with the book itself and is instead something that I've seen multiple other reviewers saying. If you've heard that Jordan has a female love interest in this, don't listen to that person because she doesn't. I don't know what book other people read but the closest we get to a female love interest is Jordan kissing a (straight) girl.

There's a lot of discussion of gender and identity in this book which were handled well enough, I guess, but its incorporation was so clunky I could never take it seriously. It would be like funny scene with the Sharps, pause for page-long introspection about gender, resume funny scene, which kept really disrupting the flow of the book for me.

I don't understand the hype around this book at all, and am now a lot less excited to read Riley Redgate's newest book, Final Draft.