Review by frogqueen - The Boyfriend List: 15 Guys, 11 Shrink Appointments, 4 Ceramic Frogs and Me, Ruby Oliver

lighthearted reflective fast-paced

3.0

ruby oliver recounts for us how she lost all her friends, her boyfriend, and her social status all at once
i'm definitely a little bit too old for this and it's definitely a younger ya novel, found myself getting annoyed by all of the teenage relationship/friendship drama especially during the middle
like just stuff that could easily be solved by the characters talking to each other, but obviously they don't, because plot
still, i liked that we got to see ruby getting help for her mental illness (vs many ya books of the time that romanticized mental illness)
i also love seeing a protagonist get humbled and
the "victim realizes they're actually a mean girl" trope
one other thing i didn't like was that the book had a bit of a tendency to talk down to its audience, especially in the footnotes explaining different words and references
i mean one of the footnotes was to explain that dream on (which some characters sing a bit of) is a song by aerosmith- who tf doesn't know this song??? and this book came out 20 years ago so it would've been even more recent at that point????
anyway probably won't continue with the series but this book was very cute