I was sold on the plot. I was sold on the title. I love Much Ado About Nothing. I love modernizations of Shakespeare. I heard the reviews of this were great. However, I heard of this book around the time when I'd made a major purchase and was all "I'm gonna lay off on the shopping for awhile." I drove (in my new car) to a far off bookstore to flip through the book and see if I wanted to buy it new and hardback. I was...sorta sold but not enough to buy it. I finally got a used copy because I was still curious about it.
I wanted to love it, I did not love it. But yet it had Moments.
Trixie and Ben and their friends attend "The Mess," a school for geniuses that ranks the kids every single week. Their best friends Harper and Cornell are perennially fighting it out for first and second place, so Trixie and Ben fight it out for third and fourth. They fight over comics. They fight over well, everything.
There was a lot about academia that bored the heck out of me (note: I am bored of academia in general though, so....). The main plot involves a lot of kids being busted for cheating at this school, and it becomes such an outbreak that clearly Something Is Going On, especially when Harper is straight up thrown out of school for supposedly doing it. The hacking aspects of figuring out what was going on with that was a bit unclear to me, but they eventually figure it out. The twist with that one is different from the original, which is good, albeit a wee bit left field but still makes sense in context.
Basically, I was bored with this book most of the time and then occasionally it would have A Moment that got my attention... and then it would go back to conversations about costumes or comic books or nerd television, all of which are My Thing in real life but somehow were not as scintillating as they are when I talk to people about them IRL. Hell, I've had more interesting conversations within the last week about geek stuff and costumes somehow. Trixie is a prickly-ish character who at first doesn't get why girls would like guys and seems a bit immature for her age, so that kind of happens. I don't know if I ever got very attached to anyone else---her female friends seem nice enough but didn't stand out to me, I never had much sense of Ben or Cornell as people either.
What did stand out to me? The scene where Trixie talks to Ben in costume, not recognizing him and yet somehow unconsciously being attracted. The scene where the friends say they are using psychology to get them together (even if saying "oh, he's so in love he might be suicidal" seemed a bit much for high school). There is a brilliantly described kiss scene that made me think, "good god, I never had a kiss that was interesting in my LIFE compared to this." Basically, everything I just put in Quote Corner was the best and the rest was all.... the rest.
Quote Corner (all quotes from Trixie unless said otherwise):
- "I didn't want someone who wouldn't understand when I referenced Tony Stark, Mal Reynolds, and Alexander Hamilton in the same breath--all handsome rogues, obviously. I wanted someone who didn't need me to backtrack and explain everything. Someone who would escort me to midnight showings but never ask me to dress up to attend. Someone who knew that I always, always, always wanted a Slurpee, but especially when it was snowing. A boyfriend, I concluded, should be like a new best friend." (Sounds good to me, for that matter.)
- "Because for all of that perfection, I couldn't force my brain to see him in that way--the making-out-in-a-supply-closet, think-about-him-instead-of-homework kind of way. Talking to him was pleasant, but not Earth shattering. At no point while he was squiring me around the festival did I have any elaborate fantasies about holding hands or him winning a stuffed animal at the beanbag toss. There was no spark of interest there. I'd had more chemistry with the homicidal clown." (Minus the homicidal clown, been there.)
- "On the one hand, I was horrified. Not just that the first person to fall in love with me had been Ben West, but that it'd happened a decade ago and I'd never noticed. On the other hand, it was almost nice. I'd always assumed that I wasn't the kind of girl that anyone would stay up late thinking about. And here I was with a boy who was thinking about me. It just happened to be a boy whom I spent hours torturing."
- "Meg and I had pointed out that West and I were similar. We read the same comics and watched the same TV shows. There had to be a way to converse with him that wouldn't end in further destruction. Somehow."
- "I'd felt more in five minutes with him than I had in an hour with Peter. I'd come home and obsessed about it and made plans to track him down. He'd been there the entire time, hidden behind a ghastly piece of facial hair and ten years' worth of rivalry."
- "The pattern wasn't a pattern. It was a parabolic wave. It was chaos falling into rhythm and forgetting it again. It was hot breath and my hands in his hair and the taste of cola. I strained into it and he was pulling me closer until I couldn't tell whether I was in his lap or he was in mine. He laughed, the sound echoing off my teeth like a triumphant yodel, like we'd found the cure for something together and both realized it in the exact same moment. Eureka! Archimedes may have coined the phrase, but Ben and I were revolutionizing it. We have found it. Suddenly, everything I'd ever read made sense. All of the cliches about electricity and drowning and falling and other sinister methods for a kiss all swept over me. It was nuclear fusion. It was the door to Narnia. It was a cacophonic wibbly-wobbly-timey--wimey symphony regenerating us into a spectacular and overwhelming new form."
- "Enemies to lovers. It's a very common trope," Meg said in a rush. "It comes up a lot in regency and Victorian literature. Standoffish man, opinionated woman. I noticed it when I started doing my extra credit for Gender Roles. And I thought to myself, "Well, there has to be a psychological basis for this plot." And there is! Your putamen and insula light up when you're being faced with something you love or something you hate. Your brain literally can't tell the difference without context clues. By rewriting the negative preconceived notions of your prior relationship, you were free to see each other as positive stimuli!"
Silence.
"She sold it to us as sexual tension," Cornell said.
"Classic Elizabeth and Darcy," Meg said.
"I am not Mr. Darcy," Ben said.
"No,..." Harper laughed. "You're the Elizabeth."
I don't know why I didn't love this since it should be right my alley. But the bits I quoted there were what I was here for, and the rest was....eh. I think this might just be me, though, rather than "this book sucks." More like "this ended up not being for me so much, sigh, disappoint."
Two and a half stars, but you may like it more than I did.
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