• 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? (Pub Date: Mar 09 2021)
I wasn't ready for such a great story!
Darcy gives out advice anonymously to make sure the school doesn't find out and that people who knows her won't feel troubled to ask Locker 89 for help. That is until Brougham catches her collecting letter from said locker and makes her help him get his girlfriend back. As Darcy teaches the tricks, she studies him but her profiling of Brougham keeps changing and so does her feelings, that for so long had belonged to her best friend Brooke.
Although the focus here is a het relationship, Darcy is bi and troubled about where she stands in the LGBT community while developing feelings for a boy. Although representation is far from the point of the book, it is very well done and is as present and it should be.
But more than that, Brougham is an excellent book boyfriend, to a point I wonder if Darcy deserves him. Don't be fooled though. She does advise people, and she is confident in her knowledge but it's not unbearable at all. I liked how the writer knew the perfect measure when building Darcy, she never looks smug of her knowledge and is in fact constantly studying and improving herself. It all sounded real to me, so she was highly relatable, especially that she could read others so easily but be almost blind about those surrounding herself.
On that topic, I loved how the conflict and Darcy herself are presented in a way you just notice the problem when you're right in the middle of it. The romance too was cute, with some very swoon-worthy scenes. To make it all better, I feel this book raises lots of topics to discuss if you're reading this with someone else or even for ourselves, the way Darcy conducts her business being one of them, and I've already mentioned the issue of her liking a boy.
It's still just a little above average as a read and that's why I didn't feel comfortable giving it five stars. Nonetheless, Sophie Gonzales is a great YA writer and being her second book I fall in love with, she's surely an author I'll keep following. Highly recommended even to readers who aren't into LGBT themes, don't miss this just because of that.
Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
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