This book was...not what I was hoping.

The story follows high school students Emma and Sophia as they play matchmaker with their friends while each attempting to produce a short film for a competition. Despite their opposing views on love, they begin to realize that maybe the hate they felt for one another was just hiding the true feelings underneath.

There were a lot of things that irked me about this book. Characters threw around the word "love" with a level of casualness that real teenagers would never use. People who have literally just gone on their first date are not in love and no high school student would say that they are. Desombre used the phrase "my stomach bottomed out" enough times that it began to get on my nerves, and every character felt cartoonishly flat. Kate is sunshiny and nice, Matt is evil, Sophia hates love and is generally pessimistic, Emma is a hopeless romantic, Myrah is obsessed with Peter. The entire story just felt... underdeveloped.

That being said, I did enjoy a few parts of it - the process of making the movies reminded me a lot of film class in high school (especially how crappy the film ended up being) and many of the cute date scenes succeeded in being cute. But these things do not balance out the others.

There are so many other cute romcoms out there (and f/f ones to boot: I'd recommend [b:The Falling in Love Montage|53066661|The Falling in Love Montage|Ciara Smyth|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1570034111l/53066661._SX50_SY75_.jpg|69421272] or [b:You Should See Me in a Crown|50160619|You Should See Me in a Crown|Leah Johnson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1568912283l/50160619._SX50_SY75_.jpg|69288604] for similarish books with way more depth of character and plot)

ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley