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I Think I Love You: 06/09/21
I Think I Love You by Auriane Desombre is a YA rom-com about a pair of young women making competing films for a scholarship. Emma is a die-hard romantic and wants to make a bi-centered romcom. Sophia is recently returned from France where her mother has gotten remarried. She doesn't believe in love and wants to make something incredibly French. The basic plot reminds me a bit of The Year Shakespeare Ruined My Life by Dani Jansen (2020) in that the plot is primarily centered on the creative process set against a backdrop of relationship drama. The filmmaking should be the setting and not the filler. It should in form the plot and the characters interactions but it can't be the majority of the page count at the cost of everything else. Like so many romances, the novel has alternating points of view: Emma and Sophia. It's clear there's a pre-France history between the two but what that is exactly isn't explained or developed. The book opens with an extraordinary amount of animosity between the two teens. Sure, it's set up to be an enemies to lovers type story but there's so much time on making the two films that we don't have the time for them to slow burn into a couple. The final frustrating detail is the straight romance that Emma sets up early in the book. It gets more page time than her chance at love. It's a sad commentary on bi-erasure. Three stars Comments (0) |