By Rachel Lippincott and Alyson Derrick

Rating: 5 Stars

Goodreads Rating: 4.31

Genre: YA / New Adult / LGBTQ / Contemporary / Romance

Publication Date: April 5th 2022

Format Read: Ebook

Goodreads Summary: She’s All That meets What If It’s Us in this swoon-worthy hate-to-love YA romantic comedy from #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Five Feet Apart Rachael Lippincott and debut writer Alyson Derrick.

Alex Blackwood is a little bit headstrong, with a dash of chaos and a whole lot of flirt. She knows how to get the girl. Keeping her on the other hand…not so much. Molly Parker has everything in her life totally in control, except for her complete awkwardness with just about anyone besides her mom. She knows she’s in love with the impossibly cool Cora Myers. She just…hasn’t actually talked to her yet.

Alex and Molly don’t belong on the same planet, let alone the same college campus. But when Alex, fresh off a bad (but hopefully not permanent) breakup, discovers Molly’s hidden crush as their paths cross the night before classes start, they realize they might have a common interest after all. Because maybe if Alex volunteers to help Molly learn how to get her dream girl to fall for her, she can prove to her ex that she’s not a selfish flirt. That she’s ready for an actual commitment. And while Alex is the last person Molly would ever think she could trust, she can’t deny Alex knows what she’s doing with girls, unlike her.

As the two embark on their five-step plans to get their girls to fall for them, though, they both begin to wonder if maybe they’re the ones falling…for each other.

Find the Book: Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository

Disclaimer: I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review!

Review

I have so much to say about She Gets the Girl that it’s honestly difficult to decide where to begin. First off, I absolutely loved it. I thought it was one of the most adorable, cute, wholesome books I have ever read, and yet it was still also deeply emotional and complex? There were characters that I loved, and they still had some negative aspects to them that made them full people. Incredible. I am so happy I got an ARC of this book and I highly encourage everyone to get around to reading it.

She gets the Girl is a dual perspective book written by a married couple, and I’m under the impression that each of them wrote a different perspective. There’s Molly, a Korean nerd who is highly anxious and didn’t have any friends in high school, and Alex, a white blonde canonically very hot party girl who sleeps around and stays emotionally distant from everyone. The novel opens with the two of them starting college, and they become fast enemies at their first party. That’s right, this is an epic enemies to lovers slow burn. And it’s gay. And it’s new adult genre. I literally could not ask for anything more.

Although Molly and Alex are set up as opposites (and in the beginning, they believe they are) Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick (the writers) do a great job of showing us as readers their similarities right off the bat. We don’t have to wonder why these girls are going to become friends (or more????) because we can see how they fit into each other’s lives. That being said, the “enemies” part still felt very real and I never felt like they were just forcing an enemies thing to make the book more interesting. This book was just so well executed I cannot stop gushing.

The one thing I was a little iffy on in this book would be that I felt that in the very very beginning, Alex was a bit inconsistently paced. It became obvious pretty quickly what they were going for, but the first two Alex chapters felt a bit like character inconsistencies. All of these inconsistencies got resolved over the course of the novel, because they weren’t really inconsistent at all, but when I first started reading that was how I felt.

If you are going into this book expecting all sunshine and rainbows, that just was not the case. Lippincott and Derrick gave their characters complex backstories that allowed them to be so much more than just the stereotypes that other people saw them as.

Alex’s parents are divorced, and her mother is a major alcoholic that left Alex to take care of both of them for years. Alex has hid that from literally everyone except her maybe-girlfriend Natalie, and because of that she feels like Natalie is the only one who will ever understand her.

For Molly, her issues were a lot more relatable to me personally. She’s super socially anxious to the point where her best friend in high school was her mom, and she has a crush on a girl from her high school (and now college), Cora, from afar. In fact, that’s how Alex and Molly start hanging out- alex decides to help Molly “get the girl”, the girl being Cora. Molly also has some family issues to work out. Her mother is clingy and doesn’t want to let go of her going to college, and her Korean mother is also dealing with a LOT of internalized homophobia that Molly is just trying to avoid. She’s also trying to hide that part of herself, and it makes for some cute revelations between the pair!

The story was well paced; it moved fast but we had so much time for introspection on the part of the characters, and their growth felt genuine. I wish I had a book like this to read when I was in high school, and I’m super grateful that I got to read it now! This is going to be one of my favorite YA/new adult (the author said it was YA but I genuinely feel it’s new adult, the characters were college aged and it’s def upper side of teen based on content, and that genre category isn’t used enough in publishing!!) books and I’ve already recommended it to everyone I know. If you’re a fan of slow burn romances, this is the one for you.