Ann Liang's newest young adult rom-com pits high school nemeses against each other: one relentless perfectionist and people-pleaser and her effortlessly successful classmate. But neither is as perfect as they seem...except in being perfect for each other.
In Ann Liang's I Hope This Doesn't Find You, Sadie Wren is perfect...on paper. She's valedictorian, school captain, and a model student.
Sadie's one vice is writing scathing, no-holds-barred email drafts. She never sends them, but crafting the furious hypothetical replies to anyone who is frustrating her is helpfully cathartic.
That is, until the emails that were never meant for others' eyes are mistakenly sent out. (The reader is given several hints as to how this happened--although Sadie conveniently doesn't dig into the possibilities too deeply--and the truth is revealed late in the book.)
Now everyone--from her co-captain to her teachers to her classmates--knows how shockingly blunt the "real" Sadie is. And the only one who seems to embrace her accidental show of full honesty is her longtime nemesis, Julius.
This young adult story is sweet and fun; the pacing often feels somewhat slapstick and frantic--as is the relentlessly ambitious, over-the-top super-pleaser Sadie herself. The feeling settles down when she finally begins to explore her feelings for Julius in a wonderfully sweet and romantic set of exchanges that feels all too brief.
The vulnerability that Sadie and Julius allow each other to see at long last was lovely.
This story premise (the high-achieving senior nemeses--minus the emails) reminded me in some ways of Rachel Lynn Solomon's Today Tonight Tomorrow, a young adult story I loved.
I received a digital edition of this novel courtesy of NetGalley and Scholastic Press.
Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book?
I fell in love with Ann Liang's fake-dating young adult novel This Time It's Real, read it in one rainy afternoon, and included it in my Greedy Reading Lists Six of My Favorite Light Fiction Reads from the Past Year, Six Rom-Coms Perfect for Summer Reading, and My Bossy Favorite Reads of Summer the year I read it.