mara97 's review for:

And They Were Roommates by Page Powars
4.0
When I saw the review saying that it was basically an Ouran Highschool Host Club fanfic, I went into it with that mind-set. The book is fun. It isn't necessarily a romance, that is very much more-so a subplot than the main story. The main story is about Charlie finding a place for himself. He becomes more confident in himself and he starts to make friends. I really liked that focus; it was all about his finding his place being his authentic self, something I think that is an experience of many queer and neurodivergent people. I enjoyed the supporting cast, no matter how stereotypical they all were. Jasper is dramatic, over the top and annoying in the beginning, but he mellows out enough towards the end. He is still authenitc, though I wish his story was a bit more resolved. It was never properly explained why he was so hurt by the previous tutor. It was hinted, but it felt like a storyline that wasn't fully resolved. I appreciated that queerness was generally accepted by the characters; it wasn't something that was overly an issue by the classmates. Also, the classmates who were being rude and black mailing to cast was also never properly resolved. But overall, I enjoyed the humour, the silly hijinks, the characters and the overall vibe of the story. It was a perfectly fun 'in-between' book. Something lighthearted, silly, with a lot of heart. I will say that the pacing / some of the writing was wack. Maybe I didn't notice it at first, but there were moment that scene transitions were done really abruptly and I was like, what the fuck did just happen? I had to check and saw one random scentence that explained that something changed. I wished that there were harder scene breaks that it wasn't so jarring. The rest of the writing was fine, though there were times where I wasn't sure whether it was dialogue of thoughts, but that might be an audiobook thing and the narrator's decision to not make clear difference between the two narration formats.