The Love Interest

Fun subversion of a lot of YA tropes! The last 100 pages or so turned into a bit more of a generic YA dystopian-ish thriller, but the premise was really clever and I definitely enjoyed this one. I would've loved a little bit more Natalie, especially after it's revealed that she's also a Love Interest, but this was still a fun take on flipping a far-too-prevalent cliche.

3.75/5 stars “Like, wouldn't it be better to send us in when we're a bit older? No one finds the love of their life while they're a teenager.““You haven't read any YA novels recently, have you?”
He's something you probably don't know about me. I love low budget movies. Anything with far-fetched plots, bad acting, and poorly done CGI is the closest thing I have ever gotten to drugs. I love low budget movies so much, that when I watch those box office superhero movies that everyone and their imaginary friend has seen, I get so disappointed. Good acting? Reasonable plot? Explosions that look realistic? What the frick are you suppose to make fun of?

This book was the YA equivalent to a low budget movie. Within the first few pages, I realized this and changed all my expectations. This wasn't going to be a James Bond film. Instead, it was gonna be that one spy movie starring Hailee Steinfeld and the girl from Game of Thrones .

Within ten pages, I stopped reading for a well-written YA book, but instead started reading for something I can make fun of. Which was a great shift of attitude, as I ended up loving this book so much.

So in this book you have Caden. Who has been raised by a spy agency to be the nice, boy next door. And Dylan who was raised to be the brooding bad boy. Why were they raised that way? Why did that have to be the nice boy versus bad boy? I have no clue but I don't even care. I don't question low budget movies.

Well these two boys are sent to small town nowhere to make this incredibly brilliant girl named Juliet fall in love with one of them. And honestly, the only time Juliet is every brilliant is when it enhances the plot. But again, I don't care. Whoever she doesn't fall in love with gets killed, which seems like a waste of time and money to that spy agency but again idc. Whoever she does fall in love with will spend the rest of their lives spying and manipulating her. But hen plot twist! Caden and Dylan fall in love with each other and Juliet won't find her Romeo.

I am also now convinced that Jay-Z and Kanye West are Love Interests and you can't convince me otherwise. Other notable love interests: my boyfriend Kaz.

Honestly this book can easily be mistaken for swiss cheese. Not only is it cheesy af, but there's so many plot holes.

Also all the characters are super flat and under-developed, but again. I don't even care.

That's just my philosophy for this entire book. I don't care. Whatever.

We could have had it all...


Okay listen, originally I thought that the premise had a lot of promise. This whole Bad vs Nice schtick where they have to compete against each other to make a person fall for them so that they could be in their life forever as The Love Interest aka as a secret spy to sell information.
That's a fun premise, you can do something with that.

Well. You certainly can. Doesn't mean that the premise by itself is enough to make the book good or enjoyable.
Maybe I am a bit angry right now that I spent time on this book, but I will still try to be as objective as possible.

First of all, my biggest issue was probably the writing, especially the dialogues.
Most of the dialogues feel absolutely fake. I cannot imagine a real person saying some of those things. And oftentimes the characters were saying way too much at once so it felt like a short monologue with a lot of exposition. Even unimportant characters say some really weird sh*t.
It would have maybe made sense if the two Love Interests Caden and Dyl had talked like that, since they are faking it to make Juliet fall for them respectively and are maybe using some cheesy lines to woo her, but god, no one in this book talks like a normal person.
Aside from the dialogues the writing is also very clunky most of the time. There's not a lot of “show, don't tell”, but rather the opposite. You either have the main character Caden thinking intensely about everything and spelling everything out for the reader or the characters have their surreal conversations with as much exposition crammed into them as possible.
All of that wasn't very enjoyable for me, unfortunately.

Speaking of the characters. Oh boy. I think I can see what the author was trying to do, there was definitely an attempt to make these characters three-dimensional. But in the end it just felt like every character could be interchanged with any other character. Well, except for Trevor because he's just a dumbass.
It's like the author picked some tropes for every character, smashed them together and hoped for the best. Most of the characters are either extremely one-dimensional because they only have to serve a specific purpose or they are very wishy-washy and it is very unclear who they really are.
And if the characters did show a unique personality or character trait, then it would usually just feel like a really bad caricature.
The characters don't act (or talk) like real people most of the time. They don't fell organic at all and I through the entire book it was very hard for me to care about any of them.

Which leads to my next point on the list: Relationships.
One would assume that, if you have a premise where two boys have to fight over the affections of a girl (but then end up falling for each other, or whatever), the romance would at least be developed properly.
Well. If the characters don't feel organic and the dialogues don't sound real, then it is maybe a bit harder to accomplish this.
I don't know, on one hand ca. 75% of this book are about the relationships between Caden and Juliet and Caden and Dyl (and a bit between Juliet and Dyl, I guess). So, technically this should be enough. It sometimes even felt too long or too repetitive.
But at the end I was still left with a “That was it?”. Caden and Dyl definitely had a few scenes together that felt like some sort of development but all of that was kind of destroyed when it turns out that Dyl was faking all of that to manipulate Caden. Even if he ended up falling for Caden - which by the way also happened all of a sudden and gave me whiplash -, it would have still taken some recuperation from Caden's side to make this relationship work again. But we don't really get that, just a short kiss, then the final showdown and then an epilogue "One Year Later".
Juliet and Caden's relationship was. Well. Boring, I guess? I can't really say much, except for the fact that Juliet often felt like a flat piece of untoasted bread and Caden's fake persona as the Nice Love Interest wasn't any better. Of course, they aren't the real couple that the reader is supposed to be rooting for, but storywise their relationship is very much the focus of most of the plot. Caden's life depends on it. But it doesn't come across as believable, at least not from Juliet's side aka the side that should be “real”.
Caden plays the nice guy and best friend role quite well, but when he has those moments where he tries to be charming or flirty or whatever, he just sounds cheesy, smarmy and maybe a little bit creepy. But don't worry, Juliet is super into it, Caden does have abs, after all. Maybe I have different standards when it comes to flirtation and developing a romantic relationship, but with Caden and Juliet it didn't feel like it made sense. Suddenly they were throwing around “I love you”s at moment that were way too early and would have made me run for the hills if I had been in Juliet's position.

....Other relationships also felt one-dimensional and made me go “meh” most of the time.
I usually love friend groups that solve the big problem together, so technically this constellation of Caden, Juliet, Trevor and Natalie should have worked for me, but their friendships felt extremely flat and I couldn't care less about their dynamics.

Last but not least, I also need to address the plot. I mean, listen, I did like the idea of having this secret organization that deals with information by planting secret agents disguised as Love Interests of important people. I had this whole idea in my head of what you can do with all of that.
The book went a slightly different direction, which isn't necessarily bad, of course.
Some aspects were just very hard to believe or were a bit too over the top for my personal taste.
And I did not like how the plot was basically resolved in the last 10% or so. It was extremely rushed, the pace couldn't even compare to the rest of the book where, in retrospect, almost nothing happens.
And all of it felt.. almost too easy? During the whole book there was this Big Problem that Caden did not know how to solve but somehow at the end they come up with this plan that magically solves everything. It felt kind of cheap? I don't know, it wasn't adequate enough for my expectations.

And Trevor. That whole thing was a mess in itself. First you make him cheat on his girlfriend, then we get some unbelievably dumb line about how when you love someone unconditionally you will forgive anything and then Nat and Trevor are somewhat together again?? Just so that we have Trevor in the group as cannon fodder during the final showdown?? But then the characters barely reacted to his (sort of brutal) death? I have so many questions about why any of this was necessary. As if Nat wouldn't have her own agency if Trevor hadn't come along? I could talk about this tiny part of the story for hours probably.

To sum it up, this book was definitely not up my alley. I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone either. It felt unsatisfying in the end and I do slightly regret that I spent time on it.