This book was such a delight to read – I was hooked from the very first page!

Darcy Phillips is a junior in high school and secretly runs a relationships advice service, where students send in their relationship problems and she anonymously responds. She’s incapable of telling her best friend Brooke about her true feelings for her, and everything starts to go wrong when a newly-single jock, Brougham, discovers her secret business and hires her to help him get back together with his ex-girlfriend.

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Darcy reminded me so much of myself at 17 (and at 19, and 21… and 23…) that I wanted to march into the book, sit her down and try to knock some sense into her, in the full knowledge that she wouldn’t change until she learnt from her mistakes the hard way. For the first two thirds of the book she is keeping a big secret from her best friend and the knowledge of what would happen if that came out was EXTREMELY stressful, even for me, just the reader! The friendship dynamic between Darcy and Brooke felt like a very universal sapphic experience, especially for young people/newly out people. The way the lines between friendship and relationship blur between two queer women, with hand-holding, kisses on the cheek, casual ‘love you’… the list goes on. It felt like a very true-to-life depiction of the way friendships can become confusing and complicated. When things started to develop with Darcy’s endgame love interest though, it was sweet and gentle, evolving at just the right pace.

I really liked how the story dealt with Darcy’s feelings around her sexuality. She is openly bisexual from the start of the book, but during the story has her first crush on a boy since coming out and is hit with anxiety about no longer being seen as queer. While this storyline felt very grounded and is something many bi people go through, the way it was resolved was a bit heavy-handed, as various students in the school’s Queer and Questioning club take their turns on a soapbox. That being said, I can’t help but wonder how I would have felt if late-teens-me had read that; I might feel differently if I was still in the process of coming out to myself.

I did feel slightly let down at the ending; I won’t spoil anything here, but it just felt slightly like some of Darcy’s character development didn’t quite stick right through to the end. It would have been nice to see her dwell a bit more on the decision she makes in the final chapter.

Overall, this was such a fun, engaging read, that I highly recommend!