I Believe in a Thing Called Love Review

This week's novel is I Believe in a Thing Called Love, a YA rom-com by Maurene Goo.  This was recommended by NPR's best books of 2017.

Desi Lee--who is valedictorian, class president, a varsity soccer star, and bound for Stanford pre-med--is great at everything.  Except flirting.  She epically fails at that.  She coughed up mucus on one guy she liked and accidentally pantsed herself while talking to another one.  She decides that the reason she's so bad at it is because there are not bullet pointed action steps to take to achieve a romantic relationship.  So she throws herself into researching the structures and character archetypes in the Korean Dramas that her dad loves so much.  From those, she devises a plan to win a guy.

This book was pretty great.  If you like rom-coms, this one is fun and cute and goofy.  Desi's nerddom speaks to me, and I liked how she was given more depth than "Type-A personality" or "Overachieving because she's Asian."  She had really solid reasons for why she felt she needed to be in control of everything and why she HAD to go to Stanford.  I got it.  I felt for her.

I loved how integral her race was to the story.  Her race was not set dressing.  She can't be recast as a white girl in a movie version.  Korean dramas are the foundation of the story, reenforced by her parent's dramatic love story, which when told by her dad, sounds like a Korean drama.

I wasn't as horrified by Desi's plan as everyone else was.  Her flirting problem was all a self-confidence issue, which she fixed by casting herself in the place of a klutzy rom-com heroine.  The dramas also taught her that even after she had a horribly embarrassing experience, she could keep going, keep trying.  Klutzy moments were a part of her story and made her endearing.  That's all great and useful, and a lot of the plot points she was hunting for fell into place after she made that mental adjustment.  That's all great, and she would have been fine if she'd stuck to that.  The problem comes in when she tries to set up situations: artificially creating a love triangle, staging minor life threatening situations in hopes the guy would rescue her.  That's not okay, and one of her friends should have stopped her.  But even though those parts were super bad ideas, I don't think the whole plan was useless.  The plan is good.  It was just implemented poorly.

***

Next week: All the Crooked Saints, YA fantasy by Maggie Stiefvater