Just FYI, I do not want to write this review. I’m feeling real cranky but I need to catch up on reviews, and it just so happens that I have to write a review for this book that was just a perfect little YA romance that I don’t have much to say about (this may change as I type), so I’m just basically starting this review by stream-of-conscious word vomiting to try to get the thoughts flowing because I read this back in fEbRuArY.
Oh, look that’s eighty-four words!
Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute is Talia Hibbert’s first YA book, and we should have all known she would be great at it. Celine and Bradley are engaging, funny, and feel like real people. Their arcs were great on their own, and they had great chemistry together. The two were best friends when they were younger, and now that they are approaching graduation, they are thrown back together after a falling out because they’re both signed up for a survival program that will give them a scholarship if they place in the top three.
Like I said above, I don’t have much to say about the plot (probably because I read the book over two months ago now and that’s like ten years in my goldfish brain) but I do want to talk a little about Bradley’s OCD. Hibbert has OCD as well, and you can tell. This is probably the closest representation of my experience with a spicy OCD brain that I have read (frighteningly, the runner up is Liar, Dreamer, Thief, and if you’ve read the book you’ll understand why that’s concerning). Although Bradley’s doesn’t manifest the way mine does, the patterns were so similar to my experience, it was almost soothing. I’m like, oh yeah, this feels right.
According to Talia Hibbert’s newsletter, she’s been having a rough go with writing for the past two years or so, but she’s back on track. Sadly it looks like the Jane Austen-inspired romances are taking a backseat to her new project, but that’s fine, I can wait. I’m excited to see what her brain can do when it’s NOT in burnout mode.