YA contemporary. Queer Black girl in a mostly white, mostly well-off town in the midwestern US doesn’t get the big scholarship she’ll need to attend the university program of her dreams, so she decides to go after an alternative source of scholarship dollars by entering the superintense prom king/queen competition for which her school is famous (and which she previously scorned). The opening really didn’t grab me. That might be on me – I have to be in the right mood for this kind of book, and I just wasn’t when I first picked it up, so maybe the opening is fine. But it may also have to do with the fact that if you stand far enough away, this book has an overall shape similar to about a million other teen-focused books and movies, so it’s actually a pretty difficult task to create a hook that stands out from that field, and I just think it was a little clumsily done. But it didn’t take me long to get into the story and to let it carry me along, in all of the up-close specifics that make this book distinctive, entertaining, and worth reading if this is your sort of thing. Admittedly, the prom competition at the centre of the plot is highly contrived to the point of being ridiculous, though I didn’t find myself minding, and there were perhaps a few more instances of people unexpectedly doing the right thing at the right time than it would be wise to look for in the real world. But I quite enjoyed the characters and the relationships, including the sweet queer romance, the intense platonic boy-girl friendship, and also the ways in which the book gently gestures to how the relationships might have been configured quite differently in a straighter, whiter telling or an earlier generation. Light, fluffy, fun.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.