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I mentioned in my review on The Lying Game that I’ve recently started a book club with a few girlfriends from college. The first book was….less than a hit (you can read more on that here), so it was important to all of us that we find something better. More entertaining, less frustrating. 

We nailed it this time.

Our May book club pick is You Have a Match by Emma Lord. I always forget about young adult (YA) novels, and then I pick one up on a whim and am reminded of their wonderful place in the world of literature.

Once I left high school, I stopped reading pretty much at all (which is ironic because I’m an English major). On the rare occasions I decided to pick up a book, it was generally nonfiction and something to do with war or Afghanistan. I despised fiction because I was an adult and I simply didn’t have time for that anymore. 

I was a dumb teenager.

I finally dove back into fiction around fall of my junior year of college and regretted the five years I’d wasted not reading it. (Don’t get me wrong, I love nonfiction still, I’m just not anti-fiction). It was perfect timing, too, because that next semester I took a YA literature class. We read one YA book a week. Many of them 400 pages. My eyes widened and I fought back tears when I read the syllabus that first night. How am I going to read a book a week? With all of my other classes and work and my general distaste for all homework and my disgust at being TOLD to read something….dread consumed me as I walked from campus. 

And then that class became the highlight of my week. The books we read were so important and covered the themes that are necessary for all of us to hear. I loved the nights that I blocked off for that class. I’d curl up on my massage couch (thanks Sara) with a hot cup of tea and plow through a book in a night. 

Some of my favorite books came from that semester, and I left with a renewed love for the YA genre. It has such an important role in literature. YA has the great pressure of creating life-long readers and walking with young people through some of their most difficult years. And they do it so well!

You Have a Match is a wonderful addition to the world of YA….read on for why!

Synopsis

Abby Day is a quirky photographer who is going through it. Her grades are slipping, she’s one paper away from failing her English class, and her Grandpa passed away a year ago. The only thing getting her through are her two best friends: Leo and Connie. Except things are awkward with Leo because of a Big Embarrassing Incident that both are avoiding discussing. Everything starts to change for Abby the day she accidentally learns of a big sister she never knew existed….and decides to go to summer camp to unravel her family’s secrets with long lost big sis Savannah Tully.

What I Liked

Abby Day is the perfect main character for this YA novel. She’s so relatable. She has good friends, but certainly isn’t popular. She has boy problems, school is hard, and her family is getting on her last nerve (and keeping huge secrets from her). This is the kind of main character that makes the reader feel like they can be a main character, too, and that such an important quality in YA literature. Young people need to be able to see themselves in books.

I also loved the character shifts we see in Abby Day. She starts out as someone who is kind of just existing. Everything in life is too much to handle and she’s barely hanging on, trying to figure out who she is in an ever-changing world. By the end of the novel, she’s shifted into someone who is confident in her talents and her flaws. Someone who isn’t afraid to be themself and go after what they want. 

Family is represented as FAR from perfect. And let’s be honest, no one thinks their family is perfect especially when they’re in high school. Again, this makes the book relatable to a wide audience.

As with all good YA books, the themes are strong and relatable (to all stages of life). You Have a Match deals with finding the courage to be yourself, to state what you need, and to take risks if it’s something you care about. Life is scary and always changing, but when we’re courageous and brave amazing things can happen. Being courageous is hard, but so is life. Which kind of hard are you going to choose?

What I Didn’t Like 

The whole book was relatable…and then the ending happened. For the most part, everything ended with a nice little bow. I loved the way some of the characters’ stories ended up intertwined, but some of it was too perfect. The large-scale ending was implausible, unrelatable, and my biggest problem: absolutely not possible without rich parents. Without money. The book spent so much time talking about courage…taking the risk to do things you love, be who you want to be. And in the end, they took the risk…but everything worked out because the parents had money. I think it’d be a better message if the characters achieved their dreams with hardwork and some bumps in the road rather than because parents were there as a safety net. 

Overall: 

Abby Day grows into herself and discovers what it means to be courageous after a couple of weeks at summer camp with her big sister, Savannah Tully, who she never knew existed. She grows in her relationships with her friends, her sister, and her family. She asks hard questions and takes big risks and teaches us to do the same. My rating: 4/5 stars. I loved the themes, the character changes and the relatability. I took one star off because I think the ending portrays a message that doesn’t fit with the rest of the book. You can grab it on Amazon here or Bookshop here — thanks for supporting me and allowing me to continue reviewing and recommending books!