I received this novel for review courtesy of the publisher through Net Galley for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

TW: cancer, grief, death, body shaming, homophobia
Rep: POC, bisexual sc's

As a fan of the film, Grease I was very eager to read this Grease inspired LGBTQ+ novel. In terms of paying homage to Grease, Sophie Gonzales nailed it on the head by turning the Pink Ladies into three female characters who wore rose gold rose necklaces versus the basketball players wearing black and white leather jackets to represent the Thunder Birds or T-Birds.

I enjoyed that the author still made this her story rather than just copying Grease entirely. I really enjoyed the story she wrote about Ollie and Will.

Ollie is forced to prolong his stay in North Carolina for the entirety of his senior year to stay with his family to help take care of his Aunt Linda and her kids, Dylan and Crista, as Linda is fighting for her life battling cancer. After having a summer fling with a boy named Will who he met at a lake in NC. The writing was fun and I appreciated the appropriate use of pop culture references. However, some of the analogies felt excessive. I'm a sucker for a story that tackles grief and I was filled with tears by the end.

This book hit all the requirements I like in a book: music; specifically pop-punk, grief, and any queer characters with strong character development. Only Mostly Devastated hit all of those for me. Throughout the novel, I was struggling with accepting the decisions each character was making, especially Will. He irritated me to no end and his relationship with Ollie was borderline toxic. But I commend the author for tackling that and making Ollie such a strong character. There were instances where I felt like I couldn't connect to him aside from being into pop-punk music, being late to things and his "emo" style.

Ollie's new friend group, The Rose Gold Ladies is what I'll call them. They made me feel so many mixed emotions specifically toward Lara. But in general, each girl was very catty and dramatic toward one another. I was confused at times why Lara was even there because they would constantly be down each other's throats. A lot of girl hate and body shaming as well. But I appreciated that they stood up for each other when needed.

Great character development and I loved the coming out scenes. They were very important. I would recommend this to anyone who liked Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda or Autoboyography.

Now I want to go watch Grease.