Reviews with content warning for Outing - Only Mostly Devastated

I really wanted to love this book, like really wanted to. I kept reading hoping to find that thing, that piece of it that makes everyone on booksta say they loved it, but that didn’t happen for me.

Sold as a “Grease” inspired story about two queer boys who have a passionate summer fling and then realize they’re at the same school after a cross-country move, I was fully prepared for this to be a sunny summer favorite. But unfortunately, this one isn’t for me.

I found the relationship between the main character and the love interest to be really toxic and I didn’t even want them to be together. It’s clear that Will isn’t ready to come out, which is fine and it’s not right of Ollie to keep expecting him to make this big sweeping romantic public gesture, but it/ also clear that Will totally disrespects Ollie in public over and over again. Ollie deserved better and Will deserved to be able to explore his sexuality on his own timeline.

Another issue I had with this book was the entire “arc” for the character Niamh. Niamh aims to be a model, and is a plus-sized side character who experiences lots of fatphobic comments in this book. We see snippets of her dieting and her exercise obsession, to the point where she’s foggy and dazed in conversations, and the author explains it all away with a little thing called PCOS. As someone with Poly-Cystic Ovarian Syndrome, I think it’s important to note that it can look really different from person to person and that diagnosis isn’t always easy. Niamh’s declaration that she has PCOS and that’s why she can’t lose weight and so she’s decided to be a plus sized model doesn’t ring out like the body-positive battle cry I think it was meant to, but rather felt like a bandaid solution to her character’s struggle by explaining away her weight as a medical condition. It felt like a poorly developed attempt to make every side character have a “thing”. I thought it was not only totally unnecessary to the plot but also really disheartening. Why did we see all the terrible comments they made to Niamh and watch her get hurt over and over only to have her big moment be to say “I medically can’t lose weight so don’t comment on it anymore”. Don’t comment on it period! This moment kind of ruined the book for me.

I’m sure this book was a lighthearted romp for a lot of people, and I’m happy for you if it was, but that just wasn’t my experience with it.

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