Jessie is still grieving the loss of her mom and trying to navigate a completely new city, home, school, and family after her father's re-marriage. One day she received an anonymous email from someone referring to themselves as 'SomebodyNobody' (SN) and she begins to get to know this person online.

What I liked:

1. You've-Got-Mail trope. I freely admit this is one of my favorite tropes, when done properly. Books like P.S. I Like You and Letters to the Lost are two examples of this concept that I really liked. You could probably also put Eliza and Her Monsters in there as well. I thought this was the strongest aspect of this story. I knew as soon as the character was introduced that they were SN, and never wavered from that at any point in the story. However, this doesn't negatively impact the book for me because I liked this person and their relationship with Jessie both in real life and also through email and IM. The 'three things' game made me smile every time. I just loved their interactions.

2. The discussion of grief. Jessie's mom passed away a couple of years before the beginning of the book. Her step-brother Theo's father also passed away. And SN lost a sibling also, which is something they are able to bond over. Also we get to see how those losses affect Jessie's father and step-mother. I do wish that maybe the author had dug a little deeper into this, especially with SN, but I get that she was trying to keep it mysterious throughout the book so people would be surprised about SN's identity.

3. Text speak. It's definitely not going to be everyone's favorite thing, but I liked the text-speak in this book. It's authentic to the characters and authentic to the time. Also, it's super easy to read, which is one thing I was looking for in this book.

What I didn't like:

1. Mis-communication or non-communication as a plot device. So, this book not only contains one of my favorite tropes (see item #1 under 'What I Liked') but also one of my least favorite. There are sometimes viable reasons that characters do not relay information to each other. In this book, the sole reason is that any type of real communication would've led to Jessie figuring out who SN is about 50 pages into the book. Say it with me folks: If your entire plot revolves around two or more people keeping information from each other for no reason whatsoever...it DOESN'T WORK!

Spoilery example below:

As Jessie begins to get to know Ethan, everyone tells her to be wary of him because of his past, saying he's 'troubled' and 'damaged'. Does she ONCE ask any of these people to expand on what they're referring to? Nope. Why? Because then she would learn that Ethan had a brother who OD'd on heroin and that is supposed to be a big twist in the story. But if you're paying attention, it's not a big twist AT ALL. It's obvious. At one point when Theo tells her that Ethan's family is "so screwed up', instead of asking him what that means she simply says, "I'm so tired of the Wood Valley learning curve." Well -- it wouldn't be if she would just ASK. QUESTIONS.

SN staying a mystery to Jessie (not that they are really a mystery to the reader. Again -- it's completely obvious who SN actually is.) only happens because she doesn't ask obvious questions at obvious times. It's aggravating.

2. Inconsistencies. This is specifically in reference to Jessie's relationship with Scarlett. Through the first half of the book, she and Scar text each other all of the time. They both talk about what is going on with them. Jessie talks about her issues with her new living situation, and Scar talks about her new relationship and going to Homecoming and possibly losing her virginity to her new boyfriend. It seems relatively equitable to me. Then Jessie goes to visit Scar half way through the book and Scarlett is immediately rude and passive aggressive toward her, after being ecstatic about it in their texts. I even went back and looked through their texts and didn't see anything that indicated that Scarlett was feeling resentment toward Jessie. In fact, early in the book Jessie actually apologizes for monopolizing the conversation and 'whining' and Scarlett says, "That's what I'm here for." Then Scarlett freaks out on Jessie, accusing her of making everything about herself and not caring how Scarlett was dealing with everything. It felt very inconsistent and out of nowhere.

3. Crass language. For starters, I am not a prude. I don't mind swearing in books. At all. Even YA books. I remember being 17 (oh, so long ago) and we used all sorts of 'bad' words. However, it felt to me like the author was trying too hard to sound young and it ended up awkward and forced.
Examples:
a. "The band's logo is a big vaginal-looking O, with a tongue through it." Describing a band some of the character's are in called 'Orgasmville'.
b. "Agnes got half penetrated. She got slipped a half peen." Discussing whether or not this girl was technically still a virgin or not.
c. "My life is a shit sandwich, with a side of jizz veggie burger." Um, WTF?! I don't know any 17 year old girl who thinks this way.

4. Cliches. While I loved all of the interactions between Jessie and her friends via digital means, I felt like most of the scenes that took place at the school, particularly the descriptions of the students, to be really cliche. For example, Jessie does that thing where she talks about all of the cliques and where they hang out at lunch, i.e. 'The popular kids hang out on this hill and the nerds go to the library while the jocks throw the football around the quad.' This is not actually a quote from this book, but it may as well have been.

Here is the actual quote: "Next day at lunch I sit with Dri and her friend Agnes, who is probably her Scarlett. I'm still too new here to see where this table fits into the high school hierarchy. It seems none of my old rules apply. Back in Chicago, the athletes, who gathered Saturday nights in the bowling alley parking lot to sit in open hatchbacks and drink cheap beer by the case and toss their empty cans at the Dumpster were the popular kids, and the theater dorks, who had ill-placed piercings and one silly streak of cotton-candy-colored hair were, well, the dorks."

Later, she says, "I was in that middle clique that every school needs to function efficiently: the worker bees. We took honors classes, ran the newspaper and the yearbook and the student government. Not popular, but at least indispensible. (Back at my old school, it was important to distinguish the worker bees from the straight-up nerds: the nerds were even less cool that the theater dorks, but they were too busy learning how to write code and nurturing dot-com fantasies to care.)" Also, "The burnouts have colonized the back lawn..."

Okay. We get it. In high school people hang out with people who have similar interests to them and see other people not in their group as cooler or not as cool as them depending on whatever criteria they've settled on for what defines 'cool'. There's nothing super offensive about this (even to me, a self-proclaimed nerd) but at the same time, it's totally unoriginal. Every 80s and 90s high-school movie has some version of this scene: the camera pans the lunchroom/ classroom/ grassy outdoor study area and we see all the different groups of people: jocks, popular kids, tech nerds, drama geeks, music nerds, and outcasts. IT'S BEEN DONE.

5. Body-shaming/slut-shaming

"All the girls here are thin and half-naked."

Describing the main antagonists: "Oddly big boobs. Short skirts that I'm pretty sure violate the school's dress code, and four coats of makeup that was probably applied with the help of a YouTube tutorial."

"I don't fit in here. Everyone is a size 0. Or 00."

"Blond-bimbo squad"

"So my sister goes to UCLA, and she's like this big hobag there, right?"

It's not all through the book, but these few instances were bothersome for me.

6. WTF sentences/scenes.
I just...

"He has what Scarlett and I would call penis fingers. Dri would call them manly."
Ummm...what? I don't understand what attributes these fingers have that would make someone else refer to them as 'penis fingers.'

"I've worked here for weeks and I can't remember her name." Jessie referring to her boss. She doesn't remember her boss's name. That's weird.

"I wouldn't mind touching the rough texture of his cheek, feeling the knot where bone meets bone." Jessie talking about wanting to feel up Ethan's jawbone. Awkward AF.

"He looks like the kind of guy who might ask before kissing you."
Is that the bar we're setting on whether a guy is decent or a scumbag? Because...that's a pretty low bar.

The scene where Jessie's father announces that he's gotten a new job really annoyed me. First of all, Jessie makes it clear that her new step-mother is the bread winner of the family. She says that what her father will be making at his new job is probably what her step-mother pays the housekeeper. If that's true, I want to be their housekeeper. Jessie's dad is a pharmacist. The *average* pay for pharmacists in the US is between $112,000 and $119,000. You have to go to medical school to become a pharmacist. It's not like it's a minimum-wage type of deal. Even working at an in-store pharmacy like Walgreens or Ralph's, the actual pharmacist (not the pharmacy techs, that's different) are making around $50/hour. To have Jessie and Theo act like it some shameful, low-paying job is ridiculous. Jessie later in the book says that her dad could write a self-help book called Marry Up. It's obnoxious.

So, as much as I nitpicked this book, I actually ended up liking the main part of the story, which is the friendship/romance between Jessie and SN. I just wish that some of the secondary stories would've been as engaging as the main story, because I don't think they served the story well at all. That being said, 3 stars is not a rating I give to books I didn't enjoy at least in some aspects, so I will probably check out more from this author in the future.