Bookish and The Beast isn’t a WOW book, but it’s a comforting, often funny YA read for romance fans who are either geeks or geek-sympathetic and who enjoy beauty and the beast variations. This is the third book in the “Once Upon a Con” series and while it works as a stand-alone, characters from the rest of the series make appearances. While the plot is nonsensical and the main characters are bland, the supporting characters are a blast.

High school senior Rosie Thorne is scrambling to finish a college application essay and help her father make ends meet. She is still reeling with grief over the death of her mother who, like Rosie, was a Starfield fan. Both Rosie and her mom love the books and Rosie and her friends are fans of the TV show.

Vance Reigns is one of the stars of Starfield. He plays a sexy villain. Vance is just a month short of turning eighteen, and after yet another clash with paparazzi his family send him to the small town in which Rosie resides. Vance has to live with Elias, his guardian. For reasons I don’t understand but would not DREAM of questioning, Elias’ house is designed just like a castle, and yes, it has an AMAZING library.

After meeting cute (twice), Rosie and Vance are ordered to spend the month organizing the castle’s library. Vance is rude and spoiled. He’s spent his entire life as one of the rich and famous and before being shipped off to the castle, he spent all of his time partying. Rosie is a serious, hard worker who always believed that the evil villain played by Vance deserved a redemption arc. Will Vance learn to love before he turns eighteen? WELL? WILL HE?

Obviously the plot is not a huge thing here – various contrivances throw these people together and occasionally apart for the sake of narrative tension, but we all know the answer to whether Vance will learn to open his heart and whether Rosie will forgive him for being rude and untrusting when they first meet. With this kind of story it’s all about the journey, not the destination, and that is made fun by a charming ensemble of supporting characters. In fact, the supporting characters are considerably more memorable than either Rosie or Vance, who are oddly one-note despite narrating opposite chapters. These characters don’t surprise me much, nor do they receive much development beyond a set collection of traits. Vance is rude because of fame and parental neglect. Rosie misses her mom, who died recently. We know these things about the characters early on, and they are pretty much all we ever know about them. Left to their own devices (without paparazzi or drama regarding the Homecoming Dance), Rosie and Vance are nice, but not super compelling. What I do know about them doesn’t make sense – how can Vance possibly be so spoiled? What happened? How is that humanly possible? And why is the jock from Rosie’s high school so obsessed with taking Rosie to homecoming? I will never know the answer to these questions.

The supporting characters include Rosie’s bisexual father and Vance’s gay uncle, who have a much more interesting romance than Rosie and Vance have. Characters from previous books in the “Once Upon a Con” series make delightful appearances, too. Rosie has loving and interesting best friends, and their conversations were often more compelling than the ones between Rosie and Vance.

There are some lovely parts to this book. One is the appreciation of books as physical objects, portals to other universes, carriers of memory, and tools for connection. I also enjoyed the quality of the prose whenever the story slowed down, as in this moment narrated by Rosie:

All of the books are wrong.

It misses the space between. The strange, thick air that fills with electricity as Vance leans closer. My skin tingles as he swipes a piece of hair behind my ear, his fingertips brushing against my cheek, and my breath catches in my throat. In all the books I’ve read, the author always described the physicality-the heat of their skin and the freckle on the left side of their lip and the way their eyebrows bunch together as they lean in, slowly, questioningly-but never the soft feeling of…just being.

Where I feel safe.

Where I don’t have to be anyone amazing, where I don’t have to fit into some stupid mold, where I’m not the girl with the dead mom, or the girl with the hot dad, or the girl who was asked to homecoming by the most popular boy in school.

It’s just a space, small and warm, that fits for Rosie Thorne.

I have to admit that other than the characters surrounding the two protagonists and the pockets of lovely prose, I forgot almost everything that happened in this book moments after I finished reading it. Many aspects of the main plot and subplot fail to resemble things that actual humans might actually do. I didn’t feel emotionally invested in the book because none of the characters felt real to me and I didn’t believe that their actions made sense for their characters.

Bookish and the Beast is a YA, and when it works at all, it works because it’s about teens. They are trapped in a moment of time where they have to outgrow their teen lives but they can’t yet move into their adult lives, and that lends real tension to the story. They are also experiencing love for the first time, which adds excitement and confusion and spark.

In short, I enjoyed this book while I was reading it, albeit sometimes in a confused manner, but as soon as it was over I forgot all about it due to the lack of character depth and lack of tension in the plot. I’ll keep following this series, though, because I always enjoy its positive take on geek culture.