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!

I haven't read any of this author's other works, but my friends had enjoyed a previous book of Hahn's, so I went into this one cautiously optimistic. YA contemporary has always been a hit or miss for me, especially now that I'm getting older and older, but I like to give each book a full try, because I never know what my next favorite will be!

This book was overall, just ok. I didn't actively dislike it, but I never found myself fully drawn in either. There were a ton of music references, and while they sorta worked for me since I actually knew a lot of the music, it got excessive at points. Not every reference was fully explained, especially in some later text exchanges, so I was often left just reading a list of songs without necessarily drawing the meaning I was supposed to out of it.

The characters also felt rather basic overall, especially Luke. His main driving force was that he liked Vada, which wasn't that compelling overall. Vada was a bit more interesting, but only a bit more, since she had an outside passion she was following. There was overall a lot of family drama that could have been more wholly resolved, especially considering how shitty Luke's dad was at points. I also didn't care for the overall ending either, as it annoyed me more than felt like a strong resolution for both characters. One ended up happy, but the other had to sacrifice something for that happiness, and I don't feel like they should have had to do that.

Overall, this book kept me mildly interested throughout, but not enough to make me rush off and try this author's other books. However, I didn't overall dislike my reading experience, and if the synopsis intrigues me enough, I can see myself picking up another of Hahn's books.

This single book read like a whole trilogy on its own!