This is the best 'instalove" book I've ever read.
I should maybe start this out with a bit of real life stuff: I tend to think there's two types of falling in love: the "show-ers" and the "grow-ers." (Yeah, Seinfeld comes to my mind too.) The grow-ers tend to take a while to fall in love with someone, which is why that works so well in novels and romantic comedies, especially if you start out the plot with them hating each other. But back when I still had feelings*, I was a show-er. I'd just know somehow (I call it "the ping") if I could get into a relationship with this one or not. A lot of folks who read romances don't like this so much, but they can also have great plots in a different way. For example, if falling in love out of nowhere shakes up your entire life.**
* note: at this point in life I have not fallen for anyone in a ridiculously long time and I am no longer emotionally capable of doing so and my heart is dead. Which is fine because I've known from age five or so that I was never going to get married or settle down with anyone anyway.
** The Steal the Stars podcast is an excellent example of this, though I dunno if I can recommend it because I did not like the end so much. If you want to be spoiled as to why, look here. It's hella spoilery though.
In this case: Allison grew up in the foster care system and unexpectedly got adopted by a single gay dad named Simon at age 16. Four years later and in college, she's still getting used to the idea. She has one best friend (also from the foster care system), Steffi, who's in college on the opposite coast, and that's all she needs. She avoids other humans and socialization in general. But one day she gets quickly roped into some social experiment in which you just stare at someone for 180 seconds, and the person she's supposed to be staring at is a guy that she got "the ping" about a few days ago when she spilled her coffee.
The book has a slow start, but if you're not feeling it for the first four chapters, stick with it through chapter 5. Chapter 5, the 180 seconds chapter, is a freaking masterpiece of covering all of Allison's changing thought processes in going from hostility to love in three minutes. It's brilliant. It has to have been very hard to write and I wish I had a real paper copy of the book so that I could like, copy all the pages and have them around. (Is this even sold in any stores?) That was amazing writing work making that develop in the way that it did, in the direction that it did.
By the end of it, the two of them are making out--then Allison comes to her senses and runs for it. After hiding out from the world for a few days, Steffi contacts her to let her know that she's become the hit of the Internet. Turns out the guy, Esben Baylor, is Internet famous for being a "social media influencer" (gag me on that term), but what it really boils down to is that he is trying to do social experiments online to make other people's lives better. Steffi actually flies out to Maine for the weekend* to talk to Allison about this and get her to talk to Esben again about what happened.
* if you're wondering how a scholarship student could afford that, uh... yeah, think about this for foreshadowing.
So Allison and Esben become a couple. They take it slow and it works great. Esben is an adorably sweet guy that everyone will wish was real. He is dedicated to making folks feel good, and when he finds out that a six year old has nobody coming to her birthday party because she has a birthmark, he uses the power of the Internet to round up guests and make sure she has an excellent time. I have a whopping hate on for social media because of all the ease of spreading hate, but this almost made me love the Internet again reading about the things that Esben does. And you know what's great about this book? Everyone is so nice! Steffi is utterly loyal, Esben's sister Kerry and his guy friends are great, new friend Carmen is great, and Simon is a total sweetheart who sends care packages that include an inflatable unicorn and gives Allison time to get used to having a dad. And other folks' darker sides (even the most cheerful of folks are not all sweetness and light) are handled well, such as why Esben is so dedicated as he is. I'll have a bit more on this below the spoiler cut, though.
Weaknesses of this book? Well, the bad side of the Internet is briefly mentioned here, but is kind of mostly ignored. Kerry is usually the one who deletes all of the shitty comments on Esben's videos before he sees them (uh, interesting that a woman is filtering the shitty comments rather than having a guy do it), but once she's in love she kind of falls down on the job and Esben has to do it himself. While he doesn't elaborate on the shit he's seeing--especially about himself and Allison, because even with an Internet beloved couple there will be some--he does get very down at one point once he finds out that a guy he helped has fallen on hard times specifically because of the video (I'll talk more about that below the spoiler cut.), and decides briefly that he wants to quit. But things change in the plot and that doesn't happen. I would also like to mention that I'm very surprised that once Allison joins Twitter, it's never mentioned AT ALL that she has to be getting horrible shitty comments from some people. Nobody's filtering her experience and she never mentions what kinds of responses she gets from people, but it made her sound extremely sheltered in a nonrealistic way. (I actually was kinda moaning, "nooooooooooo!" when she signed up for Twitter because you know how it goes.)
The later half of the book, well, I can't get into without whopping spoilers, but let's say there's some non-relationship other drama that comes up that affects their relationship. It's both heartwrenching and heartwarming all at once, and there's one surprise in there that one might have guessed at, but it went further than I would have expected. I'll mention that below the cut too, but it made me cry and yet I was good with how things resolved.
I'm giving this four and a half stars. It's near epic.
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I really wish the book had followed up on poor Christian's dilemma. I know that once the Steffi news gets out everyone's distracted, but I really wish Esben had gotten around to getting his team on finding somewhere for Christian to live. At the very least I bet Simon would have volunteered to take him in.
I bet at some point I'm going to see some commentary about how Kerry got raped as a teenager but in this book it's kind of all about Esben. I haven't been raped yet myself (and isn't it lovely that I need to phrase it that way?) so I can't speak for knowing what that feels like. But in this book it's a (kinda minor) plot point that Kerry got raped because Esben took her to a party and he feels guilty about it still. Well, duh, who wouldn't? The point made here is that Kerry has more or less resolved things within herself on this topic but she points out that Esben still hasn't and this is why he's so dedicated to making others feel better. I didn't have an issue with this but I bet somebody does.
Oh, Steffi. Steffi's choice to cut Allison off once she was "too sick" to be seen hurt. If it were me I would have been forcing myself on trying to find her or something instead of just letting her choose to die alone. It shocked me that Steffi actually turned down being adopted. I felt bad that Simon wasn't there. I was amazed at how the entire Internet came together to get Esben and Allison across the country in an airline strike in time. I was flabbergasted that Steffi told Esben-apparently in person around the start of the book!--that she was dying and needed someone else for Allison, or whatever went down there. This does lead to a very brief breakup, but by the end when they did the 180 seconds again...awww.
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