#AmReading YA

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Seven Percent of Ro Devereux by Ellen O'Clover
Published by HarperTeen on January 17, 2023
Age/Genres: Contemporary, Young Adult

Goodreads

A clever, charming, and poignant debut novel about a girl who must decide whether to pursue her dreams or preserve her relationships, including a budding romance with her ex-best friend, when an app she created goes viral.

Ro Devereux can predict your future. Or, at least, the app she built for her senior project can.

Working with her neighbor, a retired behavioral scientist, Ro created an app called MASH, designed around the classic game Mansion Apartment Shack House, that can predict a person’s future with 93% accuracy. The app will even match users with their soul mates. Though it was only supposed to be a class project, MASH quickly takes off and gains the attention of tech investors.

Ro’s dream is to work in Silicon Valley, and she’ll do anything to prove to her new backing company—and the world—that the app works. So it’s a huge shock when the app says her soul mate is Miller, her childhood best friend with whom she had a friendship-destroying fight three years ago. Now thrust into a fake dating scenario, Ro and Miller must address the years of pain between them if either of them will have any chance of achieving their dreams.

Fans of Emma Lord and Alex Light will love this stand-alone contemporary novel with a masterful slow-burn romance at its core.

Ro developed an app based on the childhood game MASH which catches the attention of an app incubator, XLR8. As the popularity of the app grows, XLR8 encourages Ro to date her match who just so happens to be her former best friend, Miller. Could this fauxmance heal their broken friendship?

I was drawn to this book because I love seeing girls in STEM, but there were so many other things that made this such a success for me.

Let’s begin with Ro. Wow! What a fantastic character. Ro was a smart and savvy young woman. She was driven and determined, and I found it refreshing that she knew what she wanted and understood that she could get to where she wanted without college. As a former educator, I was part of an institution that peddled the idea that college was the next step to success following high school. There are others, and I appreciated that an alternate path was part of Ro’s plan.

Ro had a wonderful and supportive group of people who loved and encouraged her. Her relationship with her father was so lovely. Their dynamic was something special, and Vera, her mother figure, was phenomenal as well. This non-traditional family was stellar, and I grew to love them all.

O’Clover also thoughtfully explored the idea of what the predictions of this app meant. Were the users destined only to those ends? Could they choose to go in other directions than those determined by the app? Was their course set or could it change? I think this part of the story could be interpreted in so many ways by different readers, but for sure, it was thought provoking.

Finally, there’s the romance. We all know how these fake relationships go, and I was so please with how the storyline between Miller and Ro played out. After learning Miller and Ro’s history, I was eager to see them mend their friendship because they had something really special. It was thrill to watch the ice thaw between them, and I delighted in watching them grow closer to each other.

Like I said, I am always excited about girls-in-tech books, but this book was so much more, and I loved it. O’Clover did a beautiful job building and inviting me into Ro’s world while also weaving in romance and the MASH drama. The sum total of all these elements resulted in a spectacular reading experience for me.

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Begin Again by Emma Lord
Published by Wednesday Books on January 24, 2023
Age/Genres: Contemporary, Young Adult

Goodreads

As usual, Andie Rose has a plan: Transfer from community college to the hyper competitive Blue Ridge State, major in psychology, and maintain her lifelong goal of becoming an iconic self-help figure despite the nerves that have recently thrown her for a loop. All it will take is ruthless organization, hard work, and her trademark unrelenting enthusiasm to pull it all together.

But the moment Andie arrives, the rest of her plans go off the rails. Her rocky relationship with her boyfriend Connor only gets more complicated when she discovers he transferred out of Blue Ridge to her community college. Her roommate Shay needs a major, and despite Andie’s impressive track record of being The Fixer, she’s stumped on how to help. And Milo, her coffee-guzzling grump of an R.A. with seafoam green eyes, is somehow disrupting all her ideas about love and relationships one sleep-deprived wisecrack at a time.

But sometimes, when all your plans are in rubble at your feet, you find out what you’re made of. And when Andie starts to find the power of her voice as the anonymous Squire on the school’s legendary pirate radio station–the same one her mom founded, years before she passed away–Andie learns that not all the best laid plans are necessarily the right ones.

Filled with a friend group that feels like family, an empowering journey of finding your own way, and a Just Kiss Already! romance, Begin Again is an unforgettable novel of love and starting again.

Emma Lord is one of my favorites when it come to YA. Lord writes wonderful stories filled with warmth, charm, and wit which never fail to make me happy. I am delighted to report that the streak continues with Begin Again.

There are so many things to love about this story, and I want to share the things that really won me over.

• This is a YA-goes-to-college book. It brings me joy to see more YA stories set during that first year of college. It such a big time of change for teens, and Lord did a wonderful job highlighting the ups and downs of that first year.
• Andie’s plans may have blown up, but she was able to find her place and her way with the help of a fantastic found family. Getting to know Milo, Shay, and Valeria was such a treat, and the support they gave to Andie as she found her footing was something special.
• The ribbon hunt was so much fun. Look, I went to engineering school, so I did not have as much fun as Andie, but I loved reading about all the college shenanigans I missed out on.
• I appreciated the way Lord dealt with Andie’s grief and abandonment issues. Andie was very motivated to attend Blue Ridge because her parents went there, and this was a way for her to connect with them, especially her mother who had died. I found the storylines associated with her parents quite touching, and I was especially pleased with how it all worked out with her dad.
• This was also about Andie finding her place and herself. Andie had sort of been living in a bubble with her boyfriend at the center of her world. She allowed his needs to supersede her own. Being in a new school, Andie was able to explore and discover so much about herself. She found people and interests that were all her own and as a result, she grew in leaps and bounds.
• Milo was a gem. I loved him when he was grumpy and even more when I got to know him better.

Like I said, Lord has been a dependable author for me. I can rely on her books to make me smile and laugh with the antics, warmth, and fantastic friendships she never fails to highlight. Andie captured my heart with that first dorm meet up where she showed her love for snack cakes and ability to bring the fun. The core four who were the focus of this story filled with failures, successes, endings, and new beginnings were all lovely, charming, and deserving of my affection. An A+ love interest with a fabulous family, amusing college hijinks, and some tenderhearted daughter-dad moments elevated my enjoyment and made this a solid read for me.

*ARCS PROVIDED BY THE PUBLISHER

Were you part of your school’s radio station?
Let us know in the comments!