The House Swap - Yvette Clark

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Allie is a middle child living in a sleepy English village who dreams of being a spy. Sage, an only child from Los Angeles, is more interested in her crystal collection than cracking codes. Though they have nothing in common, their worlds collide when their parents agree to a house swap - Allie's family will spend their vacation at Sage's house in sunny California while Sage and her mom will stay at Allie's cottage in England.

When the girls meet, it doesn't take super-spy skills to see that Sage is worried about the tension between her parents. Determined to fix things, the girls hatch a complicated plan. But while Allie is pulling the strings in Sage's family, she's struggling to feel heard in her own, with her obnoxious older brother and annoying younger sister taking up all her parents' time. It just may take a trip halfway around the world for Sage and Allie to find their place at home."

📚📚📚 

Good god, it's been two months since I wrote an actual review of a book. Well, here I go! The House Swap, a.k.a. The Holiday but make it middle grade. This book...was fine. Nothing terribly bad to complain about, but nothing especially engaging to gush about either. It was pretty slow-paced, probably as a result of the driving action being so milquetoast, thus not giving much to drive toward. Allie was fine, Sage was fine, the other siblings and friends were fine (although including bitchy neighbor Chloe and the whole bit with Sage's missing diary probably could have been left out and the story would have been better for it). The parents were...truly baffling. As many parents can be, I suppose. Overall, I give this a solid C+. If you're looking for something to read and don't have any other options, spend an afternoon on this. Otherwise, you could probably skip it. 

Tweet Cute - Emma Lord

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Meet Pepper: swim team captain, chronic overachiever, and all-around perfectionist. Her family may be falling apart, but their massive fast-food chain is booming - mainly thanks to Pepper, who is barely managing to juggle real life while secretly running Big League Burger's massive Twitter account.

Enter Jack: class clown and constant thorn in Pepper's side. When he isn't trying to duck out of his obscenely popular twin's shadow, he's busy working in his family's deli. His relationship with the business that holds his future may be love/hate, but when Big League Burger steals his grandma's iconic grilled cheese recipe, he'll do whatever it takes to take them down, one tweet at a time.

All's fair in love and cheese - that is, until Pepper and Jack's spat turns into a viral Twitter war. Little do they know, while they're publicly duking it out with snarky memes and retweet battles, they're also falling for each other in real life - on an anonymous chat app Jack built.

As their relationship deepens and their online shenanigans escalate - people on the internet are shipping them?! - their battle gets more and more personal, until even these two rivals can't ignore that they were destined for the most unexpected, awkward, all-the-feels romance that neither of them expected."

Real talk, the description could be more accurate. It makes it sound like Pepper and Jack are in a heated battle and at each other's throats IRL. What actually happens is even better. Jack and Pepper start working together on swim/dive team stuff with no idea that they have been Twitter-warring with each other, but they realize pretty quickly that this is what's happening, and when Jack points out how good their Twitter battle has been for business at Girl Cheesing, they team up to keep it going in order to help Girl Cheesing stay in business.

The two clearly have a thing for each other, but both are torn about their feelings, since they also have a bit of a thing for the classmate they have been chatting with on Weazel, the anonymous chat app Jack built. Pepper doesn't know that Wolf, the guy she's been talking with all year, is Jack, and Jack tinkered with the app so that it wouldn't reveal to him Bluebird's identity. Jack and Pepper may have caught feelings for each other, but that's a little confusing when they each feel equally connected to someone online they think is a completely different person. Ah, to be a teenager again. I wouldn't go back, but I do love reading about being one and remembering what it was like.

Ultimately, the very very end of this was a little underwhelming for me (I'm talking like last-chapter stuff here), but every bit of the rest of it was perfection. I love Pepper, her snark and her drive, and I want to squeeze Jack and tell him to stop comparing himself to his twin, because he is wonderful. I also want to hang out with Grandma Belly basically any chance I can get. Real talk, I have a humongous stack of books waiting to be read during my social distancing, but it's incredibly tempting to ignore those in favor of rereading this immediately. It's a lovely, heart-warming read.

Permanent Record - Mary H.K. Choi

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"After a year of college, Pablo is working at his local twenty-four-hour deli, selling overpriced snacks to brownstone yuppies. He’s dodging calls from the student loan office and he has no idea what his next move is.

Leanna Smart’s life so far has been nothing but success. Age eight: Disney Mouseketeer; Age fifteen: first #1 single on the US pop chart; Age seventeen, *tenth* #1 single; and now, at age nineteen…life is a queasy blur of private planes, weird hotel rooms, and strangers asking for selfies on the street.

When Leanna and Pab randomly meet at 4:00 a.m. in the middle of a snowstorm in Brooklyn, they both know they can’t be together forever. So, they keep things on the down-low and off Instagram for as long as they can. But it takes about three seconds before the world finds out…"

Pre-read thoughts: I loved Emergency Contact so much that, although after I read it I promised a review would come after a second read, I have no read it four times and still can't find the words to explain how beautiful and perfect it is, so I never delivered on that review promise. All of this to say...I was pretty thrilled to get an ARC of Mary H.K. Choi's second book. My fingers are crossed that I love it as much as even more than I loved Emergency Contact.

Alright. I loved this book, but I do have to clarify one thing before we get into things. If you read Emergency Contact and were expecting another dual-narrator story, delete that preconceived notion from your head. Kinda seems from the description like we'll be rotating back and forth between Pablo and Leanna, but nope. It's all Pab. Nothing wrong with that, just putting it out there for anyone who shared my expectations.

Now, on to actual review-y things! The cover blurb makes it sound like Pablo and Leanna start dating, their spot gets blown, and then the book is about them navigating the fallout. Not the case, and honestly I think what actually happens is so much better than what I expected based on the description. Pablo is working nights at a bodega health food store after taking out a bunch of student loans, signing up for multiple credit cards, and then flunking out of NYU. In the middle of what promised to be an uneventful shift, Leanna stumbles in, severely under-dressed for the sub-zero weather and looking for a middle-of-the-night snowstorm snack. The two fall into an easy exchange, and shortly after realizing that he kind of has a thing for this mysterious, clearly half-frozen stranger, he also realizes that holy shit...she's a super famous pop star. And there goes that starry-eyed dream.

Until she comes back. It's obvious that they have a connection, but it's also immediately apparent that the two lead very different lives. Leanna jets from place to place, chauffeured in private cars, flying in private plans, to manage her vast media empire. Pablo is actively dodging calls from collection agencies and refuses to open his mail to avoid confronting the massive mountain of debt he is being buried under. Leanna knows exactly what she wants from life and is hustling to get it. Pablo hesitates to make firm plans with his little brother, let alone come up with a longterm plan for his life. Can their burgeoning relationship survive their differences? And is this new relationship even what Pablo should focus on when, if it isn't to answer a phone call or respond to a text from Lee, he can't even find a reason to get out of bed most mornings?

At first blush, this seems like a sweet doomed-romance novel about an A-lister and a kid just scraping by, which I was into because in case it wasn't clear, I love Mary H.K. Choi. If she hadn't written this, though, being honest? I probably would have passed this up. Been there, done that. Nothing new. And that's why I had to point out earlier that this book is so much better than the description makes it sound! There's so much happening here. It isn't just Pablo falling in deep with Lee and trying to avoid public scrutiny, it's Pablo struggling to manage his relationships with his roommates, his parents, and his younger brother. Drowning in the expectations of others while feeling too frozen and buried to do anything or even begin to evaluate his own expectations. It's such a frank look at the weight and expectations put on young people, on the massive hole you can wake up one day and find yourself dug into because you were expected to make all these huge decisions and you didn't know what to do. This review is getting wordy as hell, but I swear it isn't enough to convey my love of this book and the perfection Mary Choi has created. I honestly don't know how she managed to build so many vibrant characters up in so short a time, but if you don't immediately fall in love with Rain, Tice, the Kims, and everyone else I don't know what's wrong with you. Permanent Record is perfection, from the first page to the last.