e-Audio, 09:25:05
Narrated by: Natalie Naudus
Release Date: May 3, 2022
Published by: Macmillan Audio
Read from: April 29 – May 2, 2022
Stand-alone
Source: Netgalley (I received a copy of this book from Netgalley and the Publisher in exchange for a just and honest review. This did nothing to influence my review.)
TW: Religious trauma & homophobia (As listed in the author’s note at the beginning)
For Readers Interested In: Contemporary, Romance, Realistic Fiction, Hint of mystery, LGBTQ+, YA, Sparkly CoversFrom the New York Times bestselling author of One Last Stop and Red, White & Royal Blue comes a debut YA romantic comedy about chasing down what you want, only to find what you need…
Chloe Green is so close to winning. After her moms moved her from SoCal to Alabama for high school, she’s spent the past four years dodging gossipy classmates and a puritanical administration at Willowgrove Christian Academy. The thing that’s kept her going: winning valedictorian. Her only rival: prom queen Shara Wheeler, the principal’s perfect progeny.
But a month before graduation, Shara kisses Chloe and vanishes.
On a furious hunt for answers, Chloe discovers she’s not the only one Shara kissed. There’s also Smith, Shara’s longtime quarterback sweetheart, and Rory, Shara’s bad boy neighbor with a crush. The three have nothing in common except Shara and the annoyingly cryptic notes she left behind, but together they must untangle Shara’s trail of clues and find her. It’ll be worth it, if Chloe can drag Shara back before graduation to beat her fair-and-square.
Thrown into an unlikely alliance, chasing a ghost through parties, break-ins, puzzles, and secrets revealed on monogrammed stationery, Chloe starts to suspect there might be more to this small town than she thought. And maybe—probably not, but maybe—more to Shara, too.
Fierce, funny, and frank, Casey McQuiston’s I Kissed Shara Wheeler is about breaking the rules, getting messy, and finding love in unexpected places.
*MY THOUGHTS*
When I saw that there was another book by Casey McQuiston I was a little skeptical… I wasn’t a fan of her second book, so I went into this with an open mind. But I needn’t have worried. In the time of COVID-19, this book was weird, but it was good.
After all these years, Chloe is going to finally win something over her prom queen rival: valedictorian, the title that really matters. But all of a sudden when she least expects it, her rival, Shara, kisses Chloe and then disappears. When Chloe is on her way to confront her, she realizes she wasn’t the only one to be kissed by Shara. Intrigue or jealousy or anger (she’s not sure which) is the driving force for Chloe to find out why Shara did what she did. So she follows the clues that Shara left behind for Chloe and the others to find. Will they find Shara at the end and get an explanation? Or will there just be more secrets?
Ok so as you can see from my second paragraph overall recap, the reason I say this is weird in the time of COVID-19 is the plot is based on the random kissing of multiple people. I know this was probably written before all this (or maybe the idea was) but Idk I just feel a weird way about it. Another thing that I thought was weird about this was the consent. Like she just randomly kissed her in the elevator she said. Maybe pair this with something on consent. Especially in a book for teens? You might think they would know better than doing something like that anyway, but we had a whole Gorilla Glue incident with an adult, so there’s that.
The characters were amazing tho. Everyone had their own voice and I was glad to see that everyone’s voice was extremely different as well. With multiple POVs its sometimes difficult to make them all different, but with this book because they kept it as one POV, but put it as third person, it was even easier to decipher. (If there is someone point me to it)
And of course I liked the writing style. McQuiston’s style has always been good, but this one for some reason sucked me in. Maybe it was because of the narrator? Idk. But I remember listening to it as much as I could. And this one is also pretty cool because it’s done with an epistolary style, meaning it’s done in the form of letters or diary entries, etc. And this one has these interesting tidbits in the “From the Burn Pile,” parts. I just think that all epistolary books are cool lol
The reason I couldn’t give this 5 stars tho is it felt like there was so much going on. These characters on this side had a relationship develop, but so did these people over here, and then there was the ending (which I feel gipped from because it didn’t really go into like it could have. Maybe they were trying to focus mainly on the main characters and not the villain of the story, but I would have liked to see them go down. Especially since it was worthy enough to be mentioned.) And then there were other people that were finding themselves. (Although this was my favorite part of the story, I DO wish they had gotten their own like, THING.) It just had a lot of different stories happening that deserved to be their own tale. And because they weren’t, it seemed a bit rushed sometimes.
The narration was done really well. To add to it, I just recently followed the narrator on TikTok and she mentioned she was doing this book in one of her videos. It’s always cool to connect to the author, but I never thought about trying to connect to the narrator too. I LOVED her ability to change her voice for the different characters, without sounding like she was trying too hard. I also loved her ability to be able to show the emotion in the book. Because trust me, there was anger, jealousy, swooning, and so much more. (Also, I didn’t realize that I had listened to that many books narrated by her or that she had so many. I only started listening to them really in the last couple years, and recognizing the narrator isn’t something I did in the very beginning. It was narrators like Natalie that made me start to pay attention.
This book was so different than anything I’ve ever read. The plot was unique (albeit weird), but the characters were great, and so was the narration. Basically it had all the makings of a great one. It’s no wonder I enjoyed it as much as I did.
Overall, I give this
