A review by bookstolivewith
Five Ways to Fall Out of Love by Emily Martin

emotional funny hopeful lighthearted medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Synopsis: Aubrey Cash has never understood why her relationship with Webster Casey, her next door neighbor, went from friends to enemies in the span of one night. But she’s honestly tired of trying to figure it out. Between that rivalry, making college decisions with her BFF and her parents’ constant fighting, Aubrey is ready to give up on relationships. But she’s a scientist at heart — and when there’s a scientific formula that she can use to prove love doesn’t exist, she has to do what any scientist does: collect evidence. But will her love experiment leave her heartbroken in the process? 

I found this to be an okay YA read that I finished in about 48 hours. Aubrey is a little angsty and tiny bit overdramatic in my opinion, although she’s dealing with a lot more than I ever did in high school and I’m arguably under-dramatic. It was sometimes difficult to sift through to the meat of the plot and the character development because everything was very crowded by her internal thoughts and diatribes, which were very adult for a high schooler. I also felt like everything wrapped up way too quickly and I wanted to have more closure at the end. 

However, it was still a fun read, with a few butterfly inducing moments — I will never get over a secretly protective trope, sorry bout it — and some steamy-for-high-school scenes. Webster is also a bisexual love interest, which I haven’t seen before in a YA novel so that was cool! (There’s actually some addressing of anti-bi comments and mindsets, so head’s up on that — nothing major or particularly heavy but it’s there.) 

Overall, Five Ways To Fall Out Of Love was a solid weekend read! I’d probably say get this one from the library, unless you really love all YA. 
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