I was really surprised by Tweet Cute earlier this year, and was excited to jump into Emma Lord's next book, You Have a Match, but unfortunately this one just wasn't for me. Whereas Tweet Cute had me smiling fairly quickly on, I knew just as quickly that this one wouldn't hit quite the same way, but I wanted to push through just in case something changed.

While there are things I appreciated about this book, especially later on, it felt like overall there was too much going on. This led to certain subplots being abandoned for moments at a time, or side characters backstories not having enough time to be shared/worked through. It resulted in many of the endings for these subplots to feel hollow, especially romantically. A big difference between Tweet Cute and You Have a Match is how interconnected (or not) the family and romantic plot is. In the former, they seem to unravel side by side, meaning that both of these plots are being developed throughout the whole book, even if one becomes the focus for a small bit. This isn't the case in this book, as the relationship Abby has with Leo is entirely separate from the family drama going on. The family story is obviously much more important, and rightly has the focus of most of the book, but the romantic plot heavily suffers for it, to the extent that I believe this book would've been stronger without it. Instead, we get little scenes thrown in between the family development, trying to keep you hooked on the slowly blossoming relationship between Leo and Abby, but it gets dropped every single time for the family plot. While I was originally intrigued by the romance, and was excited to watch it unfold, I quickly lost all interest, and this made a large part of the final ending also feel hollow to me.

I also found the setting of the summer camp entirely unconvincing. This setting generally brings some forced structure to the looseness of teen summers, but it didn't do that at all here. It only served to create some tension and animosity between certain characters based on the uneven power hierarchy based on camper/counselor dynamics, but we never actually get to see any events or the academic classes Abby was supposedly attending. This is only worsened at the end, where Abby is constantly about to leave the camp for one reason or another. It really only served to force proximity between characters that otherwise would have just avoided each other the whole summer.

Overall, I just wasn't into this book, and would definitely recommend Tweet Cute first! This story could have easily been a good one had the subplots just been tightened a little bit, and unnecessary pieces removed. I get it's common for YA contemporaries to deal with romantic plots alongside familial ones, but if your familial plot is strong enough (which it was here!), it can work just fine!