Meet Cute Diary

I've been meaning to get to this book (my TBR piles--yes, piles--are ridiculously long) for forever. Anyway...I finally did. Read Emery Lee's book ("Meet Cute Diary") in almost one sitting. 

["Noah Ramirez thinks he’s an expert on romance. He has to be for his popular blog, the Meet Cute Diary, a collection of trans happily ever afters. There’s just one problem—all the stories are fake. What started as the fantasies of a trans boy afraid to step out of the closet has grown into a beacon of hope for trans readers across the globe.

When a troll exposes the blog as fiction, Noah’s world unravels. The only way to save the Diary is to convince everyone that the stories are true, but he doesn’t have any proof. Then Drew walks into Noah’s life, and the pieces fall into place: Drew is willing to fake-date Noah to save the Diary. But when Noah’s feelings grow beyond their staged romance, he realizes that dating in real life isn’t quite the same as finding love on the page."]

I kind of...couldn't stand Noah for a while. Then again, he's a teenager who has a bit of a diva-complex, who (like a lot of teenagers) think they have everything figured out. And yeah, he's a bit selfish for most of it (but character development). But he really grew on me, as did his very cute blog and totally-unrealistic-but-totally-adorable Romance/Relationship Checklist.

There's a lot of figure out about yourself in this one too, especially when it comes to gender-identity and sexual-identity. It's very empowering, especially since these characters are teens and they've figured out so much about themselves already (and still figuring the rest out). It's also encroaches on the darker side of knowing yourself at such a young age (and being surrounded by other people who haven't and who haven't figured out how to be/act around people who aren't cis-het, people who haven't learned much about the other labels besides cis and het, people who are mainly just spouting off their parent's opinions on said subjects--mini rant over), so be mindful of the below trigger warnings.

I don't know how to gush about this book as much as I want to without spoiling anything. Because like, a lot of my favorite aspects of the novel came after several plot twists (though they were delightfully and comfortably predictable--it means the author trusts the reader to put 2 and 2 together).

Trigger Warnings: transphobia, homophobia, bullying, suicide attempt, almost-use-of-dead-names/wrong-genders, anxiety, anxiety attacks, lying, toxic relationships, etc

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