Allison and Kate met during the first week of a four-year-long costume design program at the Montreal College of the Arts. Now in their third year, they’ve been best friends since. Kate is this cool, gorgeous young woman everyone wants to either be or be with. Allison is cute and becomes a blubbering mess any time a beautiful girl so much as looks at her, which makes her plan of finding a girlfriend by the time she finishes college extremely uncertain. When we meet them, they’re in that place where friends-to-lovers romances shift, the moment when what has always felt comfortable takes new meaning.

The people who seem always level-headed, who look like they’re holding it together, also often hide painful secrets. We all have some kind of childhood trauma, from high school, or from how our family treated us, sometimes unaware of the damage they left. Some have it worse than others, but teenagers are sensitive works in progress and sometimes, one off-handed remark sets off a reaction that will send a person into adulthood with a terribly inaccurate idea of who they are or what is expected of them.

Katia Rose’s books are reliably enjoyable and this rom-com is too, even though it won’t be at the top of my Rose list. It felt a bit too predictable and simplistic at times but the characters, as usual, are lovely.

Girlfriend Material @ Bookshop.org / IndieBound / Books-A-Million / Book Depository / amazon

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