Character Development: ☆☆☆
"Sidney has one goal for their junior year. Well...two, if they're being honest. Number one: become president of their school's Queer Alliance club. And number two: keep their self-diagnosed anxiety in check so their grades don't tank like they did last year.But when the election results in a tie with none other than Sidney's arch nemesis, the class clown Forrest, the two are forced to share the presidency until a revote at the end of term. Sidney expects Forrest to be insufferable, but it turns out that working together is...kind of nice?As surprising feelings for Forrest emerge, Sidney's techniques for managing their anxiety stop working. With the reelection approaching and assignments starting to pile up, will all this pressure be too much for Sidney to handle on their own?"
This is a tough book to review because, while there were things I really loved about it, all of those things were happening in the background while the main storyline was being repetitive and somewhat boring. It started off strong - at the first Queer Alliance meeting of the year, Sidney is thrown a curveball when they and Forrest tie for the presidency - but even initially, I found Forrest to be a much more sympathetic character than Sidney. I had so much sympathy for Sidney when it came to their unmanaged OCD (although to be honest, I had to suspend so much disbelief to buy that in the year of our TikTok lord 2026 they hadn't come across ANYTHING online that clued them in to it being more than anxiety), but outside of that I thought they were incredibly judgmental of Forrest based off of ONE comment from two years ago.
The way it's written, it seems like we're supposed to side with Sidney that Forrest is a class clown and doesn't take anything seriously, but from the jump Forrest comes off as thoughtful and willing to compromise and work together, while Sidney comes across as inflexible and rude. I mean...they're a teenager, so I'm not going to judge them too harshly for that, but it's always a little weird for me to read a book where the main character isn't one I find very likeable. Fortunately, they did grow on me as they got to know Forrest better and their harshness toward him softened, so that's something. UNfortunately, aside from that shift when it came to Forrest, I didn't see much character development from them until the end of the book.
As mentioned, the book started off strong, but after a few chapters of Queer Alliance meetings and settling in to the start of the school year the plot just...dragged. The whole "I can't let me mom find out I'm struggling, I can't tell my friends what I'm dealing with, I don't know what's happening to me" went on for way too long with no progression, and I wish that instead of stringing that out until a few chapters from the end, we had seen them decide to open up to a friend about it earlier in the book and then had more time to watch them settle in to what having that diagnosis meant and get to repair things with Forrest and get back on track with school. That would have been so much more satisfying than The rushed (and somewhat incomplete) resolution we got from the last handful of chapters.
Finally, and completely off topic from the rest of this review, I thought all the stuff with their dad added nothing to the story and ended up feeling like it was being shoehorned in to add another element to the plot that was completely unnecessary. I would much rather have lost the dad drama in favor of more development of their relationship with their mom and her girlfriend, who both seemed fascinating and were criminally underutilized. Addiction is a disease, and I'm glad that was touched on (again, at the very end!), but there was too little air time to his plotline to make him a fleshed-out realistic character and it instead made him feel very caricature-y, the deadbeat dad who just can't seem to get it together no matter how many chances he has to make things right. We don't need to waste word count on a mediocre dude when there are two dynamic, interesting women sitting RIGHT THERE just waiting for their moment to shine.
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