As soon as I read the synopsis for this one I knew it would be my kind of YA contemporary. And I can tell you I was not wrong. I laughed out loud multiple times and kept reading until late at night haha. Let’s see what else I have to say about Perfect on Paper.

Cover

Isn’t this cover super cute? I adore the colours that are used and the illustrations of Darcy, Brooke and Brougham are perfection. This is the kind of cover I want for my contemporary reads. Especially the cute ones like this. When I see this cover I immediately want to pick up this book.

Review

We follow Darcy Phillips, who gives anonymous love advice through a locker at school. First off, amazing way to make money in my opinion. Secondly, I loved how much effort Darcy put into her advice. She actually did a lot of research and knew a lot about relationships and human behaviour. I really enjoyed how this was incorporated. The anonymous part of course was also fun to read about haha.

While Darcy is great at giving relationship advice, she’s not that great with her own relationships. She has a long standing crush on her best friend Brooke but doesn’t act on it. Darcy is also pretty certain Brooke has a crush on someone else. I thought it was very realistic that Darcy wasn’t perfect in regards to her own relationships, she made some big mistakes but she’s also just a girl in high school. And in the end she really owns up to all she did and tries to make it right. I appreciated that so much.

Pretty early on in the book Darcy gets caught by Alexander Brougham while she empties the advice locker. And he blackmails her into being his dating coach so he can get his ex-girlfriend back. I adored Brougham so so much! Darcy and Brougham don’t have the best start to their (work-)relationship but I laughed out loud reading their banter. It was my favourite part of the book. I also loved how their relationship evolved from there on out.

Yes, this book was pretty predictable but I didn’t mind that. It was all about the journey to where we all knew we were going and I loved the journey. The characters are well written and I loved all the representation. Darcy is bisexual, Brooke is a lesbian and they are both in the LGTBQIA+ group in their school so you meet a lot more queer people. And Darcy’s sister is trans and I loved her so much. One of my favourite characters in this book!

Sophie Gonzalez said this book was a subtweet to people saying this about her previous book: “a bi person who is in a relationship with a different gender is not correct queer rep”. Biphobia is unfortunately still a thing and this book talks about that as well. The main relationship is a bi girl with a straight boy, there is also a f|f romance but that is not the main focus. I thought this was also very well done, and unfortunately also very necessary. All in all this was a very cute book that made me laugh out loud and with wonderful rep.

That was my review for Perfect on Paper. This one releases March 9th and I hope all of you pick it up. It was so good and I will definitely read more books by this author!