Title: Perfect on Paper
Author: Sophie Gonzales
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Length: 350 Pages
Category: Contemporary Teen Romance, Bi Romance
Rating: 3.5 Stars
At a Glance: While I didn’t love this book with quite the level of joy and excitement I did Only Mostly Devastated, it’s got its own charms and delivers an important message to boot, which elevates it to something much better than good.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Her advice, spot on. Her love life, way off.
Darcy Phillips:
• Can give you the solution to any of your relationship woes—for a fee.
• Uses her power for good. Most of the time.
• Really cannot stand Alexander Brougham.
• Has maybe not the best judgement when it comes to her best friend, Brooke…who is in love with someone else.
• Does not appreciate being blackmailed.
However, when Brougham catches her in the act of collecting letters from locker 89—out of which she’s been running her questionably legal, anonymous relationship advice service—that’s exactly what happens. In exchange for keeping her secret, Darcy begrudgingly agrees to become his personal dating coach—at a generous hourly rate, at least. The goal? To help him win his ex-girlfriend back.
Darcy has a good reason to keep her identity secret. If word gets out that she’s behind the locker, some things she’s not proud of will come to light, and there’s a good chance Brooke will never speak to her again.
Okay, so all she has to do is help an entitled, bratty, (annoyingly hot) guy win over a girl who’s already fallen for him once? What could go wrong?
Review: I was absolutely so charmed by Sophie Gonzales’s Only Mostly Devastated—the writing, the characters, and the storyline, especially, were a lot of fun, so I was excited for her latest release, Perfect on Paper.
This book offers up an entirely different sort of story in a high school enemies-to-lovers romance that reads like a Gen Z-er’s guide on how to navigate and survive the inevitable ups and downs of teenage relationships. Darcy Phillips has been running a low-key moneymaking gig, secretly offering advice to the lovelorn out of Locker 89, an abandoned locker at school where her fellow students leave anonymous letters (and a little cash, thanks) seeking advice on a variety of woes, from breakups to finding out if someone is interested enough to risk asking out.
When Alexander Brougham catches Darcy at the locker collecting letters after school one day, the jig is up and Brougham takes advantage of the secret to ask her for help to get his ex-girlfriend back.
It becomes clear early on that Brougham is Darcy’s foil, and eventually the same becomes true for Darcy to Brougham, the more time they spend together. I would even go so far as to say some of their dynamic might have given me some Pride & Prejudice vibes, but that may just be me. I do have to say, I did not love Darcy or Brougham outright, so kudos to the author for giving me a storyline that kept me engaged even as Darcy was salty and Brougham aloof, and then allowed me to judge Darcy pretty harshly for doing a no good, awful, very bad thing—which she does at least realize and acknowledge was bad, and felt the appropriate levels of guilt for even if it took her a while to make amends for it—and kept me hooked to the end.
Darcy is the perfect example of someone who takes her advice-giving seriously, but whose own love life is such a disaster that you wonder how she can be so perceptive for everyone but herself. The aphorism “know thyself” isn’t one Darcy’s necessarily familiar with. She’s head over heels for her best friend Brooke, but doesn’t know how to tell her, does some shady stuff to try to keep Brooke for herself, and then loses her anyway. It takes working for Brougham, then with him, to confuse her even more, but only in the way that makes her look inward a little more.
Perfect on Paper is about more than relationship angst and getting busted for running a questionable, possibly illegal, business out of a high school locker, though. It’s a book that celebrates queer teens and diversity, and it confronts biphobia head on. One of Darcy’s greatest anxieties is that if she falls for a straight guy, people, especially her friends in the Queer & Questioning club, won’t accept her anymore. There are lots of great messages delivered through these conversations about bisexuality, affirming and supportive conversations that speak directly to teenage readers.
While I didn’t love this book with quite the level of joy and excitement I did Only Mostly Devastated, it’s got its own charms and delivers an important message to boot, which elevates it to something much better than good.
You can buy Perfect on Paper here:
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