This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by KatieBuggie. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the YA Romance category.

Here is KatieBuggie's review:

I’ll start with a plot overview, so you have a little context for my response to the book—I’ll try to stay neutral, but that’ll be hard. Your main characters are Rikki (the girl) who narrates the novel in first person. She’s intelligent and insightful, which makes her vapid and irrational insecurity even more painful. Then you have Sam (the boy) who is a cool, complex, sensitive teenager (where the hell were guys like him when I was growing up?), but he has one flaw: he’s deeply repressed (not just sexual, but emotional too, so a spectrum of psychological repression), which causes him to do really whacked out things, but more on this repression trope later.

We start at a middle school make-out party where Rikki and Sam kiss in a closet due to a game of seven-minutes-in-heaven. I felt a little pedophilic during the scene. I know this is YA—but I’m thirty reading about thirteen-year-olds making out; it was weird. The kiss is awkwardly hot because, from Rikki’s narration, we are lead to believe they hate each other, and yet she gets all-the-feels when Sam kisses her nose then lips. The next four years of high school are glazed over with four years of hatred and competition between the two because they are both smart, and you can only have one smart kid in town, right? High school ends in tragedy for Sam, and Rikki makes a huge sacrifice (for her arch nemesis—uh-huh, sure) that lands them at the same college, in the same dorm, and with the same group of friends. Then Rikki and Sam traverse the age old plot of falling in love with one’s enemy. The majority of the novel is one of those “I hate you, but I love you, but I don’t know it” kind of things, which ends up with them realizing their love and hitting a very PG HEA. The single sex scene is the last paragraph, and that fades to black at Sam’s dorm room door.

Hopefully, if I did my job right in the plot summary, you’re thinking, “Aw, a sweet coming-of-age love story.” Now let me dispel that notion. Sure, the book has two heterosexual protagonists falling in love during their formative years. But that is not really what this novel is about. It is about deeply repressed people doing some seriously messed up shit. If this were repression built from middle school confusion of their first sexual inklings, or from high school competition that caused them to deny the crushes they had on each other, I’d get it. It’d be a cute thing for the cute couple to overcome. But this is serious repression. Repression that causes several of the book’s major characters to do the following (warning, vague spoilers follow): steal his beloved’s panties, get into a bar fight that lands her in the hospital, throw away his long-cherished virginity on a stranger whose name he doesn’t remember in a back alley, and articulating the desire to be an “academic nun.”

There are two main reasons this repression is a total fail. First, it is completely uncharacteristic of most of the characters who suffer from it. There are many moments when I was like, “WTF, what just happened?” and not in a cool-I-didn’t-see-that-coming-way, but in a seriously-that-would-never-happen way. What’s worse about this repression is that it is never resolved. It would be one thing if it was a struggle the characters try to overcome, but it’s not. It is simply delivered as a part of sexual and/or romantic territory, and I think that’s really dangerous for a book that’s billing itself as sex-positive. Characters actually discuss how bad slut-shaming is (which is a great message), but Rikki internally shames herself constantly, and it’s never resolved (which is a horrible message).

For example, in the last scene of the book, when Rikki goes to Sam’s dorm room wanting to have sex, she calls herself a “sex-crazed succubus!” She’s going to have sex with the guy she’s arguably had a crush on since middle school, been in love with for the past year, and committed other consensual intimate actions with—and she’s a sex-crazed succubus. To me this is dangerous thinking that my favorite kind of romance novels address and resolve, but not here.

So, if you are a body confident individual who feels comfortable with your current and potential sexual exploits, this book is not for you. The narrator’s self-loathing and the other characters’ uncharacteristic actions will either break your heart or annoy you to death. If you are timid and unexperienced, looking for a good role model for sex in college, stay the hell away from this book; it will only add to your anxiety. But, if you are a sex-education teacher, looking for a good depiction of consent, this book is gold.

Consent is done beautifully in this book. The man-whore villain, who lives across the hall, gets Rikki drunk and alone and puts the moves on her, and then he realizes she isn’t really into it. She confesses her feelings for Sam, and the man-whore villain is just like, “Oh, okay.” And Rikki runs off to find Sam. She isn’t pressed up against the wall—she doesn’t have to threaten him—there’s no need for a fight. She’s not consenting, so he’s not pursuing. And this is the villain respecting consent! Also, it’s not just females who need to give consent, it’s the males too. The hero (Sam) doesn’t want to have sex all day/any day, even with the heroine. It’s refreshing and the only reason I give this book a C- not a D-.