Mostly cute and awkward YA story about a teenager who moves from Quebec to Austin in high school. It’s very light on the political issues (he’s black and his parents are immigrants from Haiti) and social commentary (he begins by comparing his new school mates with stereotypes of high schools students in movies).

Good for a car ride... one problem: there is a very soft ending and you’ll be left wanting to know desperately how it worked out for everyone. The non-neat “lose ties” ending makes sense for the point of the story but left me gnawing.

The ending was realistic which is amazing but so unexpected

ALSO I NEVER LIKED AARTI

This was freaking hilarious. Fair warning, lots of swearing but oh my heck this was a great book. A true joy to read.

2,5 Stars

It's ok. Not too bad, but also nothing super enlightening or something. I didn't hate it, but let's just say that I was really happy that I was listening to this on 1.8x Speed.
A solid 2,5-Star read.

I did not care for the ending AT ALL.

dnf
aarti PURI ?????

If Mean Girls and Some Kind of Wonderful had a baby, this would be it. I really enjoyed this book, Norris was such a little asshole and I loved every minute of his sarcasm. I do think that the way his parents handled his behavior was way too light and too understanding, that part is not realistic. Surprisingly this is going to be a story that stays with me, I would love to see this as a movie, it would do well.

Overall, this book was exactly what I expected it to be—a palate cleanser to get me going from one 600-plus-page book to the next. Kudos to Ben Philippe for that. It was amusing enough and kept me interested, so that's already three-star material right there.
But there were a few things that really prevented it from becoming a four- or five-star read. My biggest issue with it was that all the characters kind of had the same character voice. They all spoke in the same, vaguely snarky, flippant, clever-teenager way. That really rubbed me the wrong way—not that one character can't have that voice (Norris, for example; it fits with his character), but all of them talking the same way was too much. Also, it seemed a little bit too perfectly manufactured to fit the "sarcastic loner" cliché.
Another thing I didn't super like about the book is the amount of innuendo loaded into it (and sometimes it wasn't even thinly veiled innuendo...) That's not something I really enjoy reading, so it definitely detracted from my overall liking of the book. But that's more of an individual-preference thing rather than something that is really wrong with the book.
Not much to say about it—there were some sweet moments, I liked Maddie as a character, and I cringed at all the right moments. A passable three-star short novel.

Lots of fun, and I loved the voice and writing!