After hearing the bookseller’s pitch for She Gets the Girl, we bought a signed copy. The authors are Pittsburgh locals and wives, and the book is a loose retelling of their love story. How adorable is that?? Plus, it was a perfect light read for our sapphic book club.

Despite her young age, Alex Blackwood is already an experienced, flirty customer service rep. She’s had to grow up fast to take care of her alcoholic mother. Just when she feels she’s got money and her mom handled—enough to go to college five hours away at least—her girlfriend Natalie (lol) drops a bomb. Prove she can maintain a platonic friendship, or they’re over.

Molly Parker is a painfully shy nerd who longs to date her high school crush, Cora Myers. When she hears that she and Cora are both attending University of Pittsburgh, she wants to seize this second chance. It’s easy to go from zero friends in high school to one sparkly new girlfriend, right? When Alex figures out Molly’s goal, she has a proposition to solve both their problems. She’ll teach Molly how to snag a date (in five easy steps no less), and Molly will vouch for Alex when Natalie visits.

You can guess what happens. My main reaction to She Gets the Girl was CUTE CUTE HOMOSEXUAL CUTE. From start to finish, this novel gloried in rom-com fluff, with gentle nudges to get the reader thinking. The character work shone. Everyone is casually queer, because why wouldn’t they be. While I’ve read/watched a lot of media complicate the “Blonde Bimbo” stereotype, less media has complicate the “Awkward, Shy Girl” trope. Natalie is the closest we see to a villain, and even she gains texture: Alex was an unfaithful girlfriend and had some growing to do, after all. Both Molly’s and Alex’s mothers have a lot of page time, and the contrast of the relationships was delightful.

Bizarrely, the only drawback of the book is what drew me to it in the first place. It’s set in Pittsburgh and I was excited to see the city feature in a lesbian rom-com! The novel frequently mentions Pittsburgh hot spots—Carnegie Library Main Branch, the Carnegie Art and Natural History Museum, the Cathedral of Learning, Schenley Park, The Phipps Botanical Garden—but they lack sensory details. During our book club video discussion, my wife filled the chat with pictures of these mentioned places, and our other readers gasped, “Oh!! That’s what it looks like!!” I chalked this up to the places being so familiar to Lippincott and Derrick. To them, these places are normal and every day. One can forget that others don’t know what they look like.

So that lost the book a star, but overall, I can’t emphasize how cute She Gets the Girl is. It’s feel-good, queer comfort. It’s a celebration of how college offers a soft reset of one’s life—a unique chance to change, grow, learn, and love. I would like ten more New Adult reads just like this one.