Publisher: Farrar Straus and Giroux (BYR)

I received this book for free from Straus and Giroux (BYR) in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Desi Lee believes anything is possible if you have a plan. That’s how she became student body president. Varsity soccer star. And it’s how she’ll get into Stanford. But—she’s never had a boyfriend. In fact, she’s a disaster in romance, a clumsy, stammering humiliation magnet whose botched attempts at flirting have become legendary with her friends. So when the hottest human specimen to have ever lived walks into her life one day, Desi decides to tackle her flirting failures with the same zest she’s applied to everything else in her life. She finds guidance in the Korean dramas her father has been obsessively watching for years—where the hapless heroine always seems to end up in the arms of her true love by episode ten. It’s a simple formula, and Desi is a quick study. Armed with her “K Drama Steps to True Love,” Desi goes after the moody, elusive artist Luca Drakos—and boat rescues, love triangles, and staged car crashes ensue. But when the fun and games turn to true feels, Desi finds out that real love is about way more than just drama.

I honestly cannot believe I haven’t seen more hype for I Believe in A Thing Called Love because it is one of my favorite books of the year (out of the 100 I’ve read so far.) It’s charming, a little unrealistic but PACKED with fun, joy, and general happiness.

Those are very general, descriptive terms that could describe any fluffy book that some people might write off all together but you know what? They would be missing out. For one, ‘fluff’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Charles Dickens wrote commercial fiction (and while it wasn’t fluff, he was getting paid by the sentence so those painfully boring pages weren’t because he was being ~literary~), Shakespeare’s works were definitely mean for entertainment, etc etc.

On the surface, I Believe in a Thing Called Love is the story of a girl who just wants to find true love. In high school. But more than that, it is a story about making mistakes, grief and growing up. Desi is not perfect even though she tries hard to be. She learns over the course of the book that it is impossible to do and be everything at once.

This book is part coming of age (although we could argue that all YAs are technically coming of age novels) part romance and just plain, old fun. It also just focuses on a large array of relationships outside of a romantic one. Desi has a good group of friends who put up with her as she tries finding to get a guy to fall in love with her and they call her out when she is being over the top (and still help her out because they love her anyway.) Desi also has a really good relationship with her father who is adorable and a romantic as well.

Overall, if you are looking for adorable books to add to your summer TBR, then this needs to be on it because I Believe In a Thing Called Love is 110% worth it. Also it is reminiscent of old school YA novels in some of the best ways possible (old school in this case means pre 2010 because that was 7 years ago and I am not over the fact that 2010 was that long ago.)

5 Hot Espressos