YA contemporary. A young woman at the end of high school has spent every spare moment over the last few years making a podcast called *Artists in Love* with her boyfriend, with whom she is in one of those ‘perfect couple’ high school relationships. Except he breaks up with her and announces he’s leaving town for a great opportunity he’d never told her he was applying for, and in the same week she discovers her (intensely eccentric) parents are separating and gets maybe-kind-of fired from her job. Newly obsessed with secrets from her parents’ past and deeply bitter about whether love is possible at all, she pulls an old friend and a new friend into making a very different kind of podcast…and she has to start dealing with the fact that her relationship with her boyfriend wasn’t ever even close to storybook perfect, that she is in fact a “messy bisexual” who has done some pretty hurtful things, and that she has been living her life guided mostly by what other people expect of her rather than figuring out who she really is and what she really wants. Generally, I read YA contemporary for a certain kind of easily consumable emotional jolt, but not with any great expectation that it will capture the complex messiness of lives, relationships, and identities. This one gave me both, though, and I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.