I'm not going to lie, I was expecting to give this book no more than two stars but here we are.

There are so many great things about this book and here's a few of them:
- The characters. Natasha and Daniel are so endearing in different ways while also being flawed in a way that makes them feel like real people. The many supporting characters are the same, which is incredible because a lot of them you only know for a few pages.
- The way race was handled. I expected it to be good but I didn't expect it to be incredible. It's never a driving force for the story but it's also never forgotten. I especially loved the look at how people of colour can be racist.
- Natasha and Daniel's relationship, while being really unrealistic, was so incredibly sweet I couldn't help but fall in love with it.
- S C I E N C E! Despite not being a big fan of the subject in school, I love reading about it in books, and reading about Natasha's passion for it was one of my favourite parts of her chapters.
- The relationships the leads have with their parents was so interesting and realistic. Their parents aren't their best friends or their worst enemies; they're somewhere in between and it was done beautifully.
- I'm not gonna lie, I teared up a little while reading the epilogue. A true testament to how much these characters ended up meaning to me.
- My biggest praise is the writing. Nicola Yoon has a wonderful writing style that feels like a mash-up of many contemporary writers in the best way possible. It's fluffy, straight-to-the-point and poetic all at once, while never coming across as stupid or pretentious. She can write teenagers as the minors they are while still knowing that they're intelligent human beings. There are many points of view throughout the book, primarily Natasha and Daniel's but also multiple side characters, and each of these points of view was written in a slightly different way. If it hadn't been marked whose perspective it was, I'm confident I could have figured it out just by a brief inner monologue.

I completely get why people think this book is pretty meh. It has insta-love to the max and doesn't appear to have much going on. But I surprisingly loved it and definitely want to pick up more of Nicola Yoon's future works (I'm not going to read Everything, Everything though because I know the shitty twist and it's put me off)