It's fair to say that this has to be the single most unlikely of the six hundred or so books I've reviewed at the Nameless Zine thus far. I enjoy a lot of different genres of fiction but YA romance really isn't on the list and factoring in the important reality TV angle moves it even further away from being something I might like. However, I know Sara Fujimura. I've shared a table with her at Phoenix Comicon, back when she was promoting her self-published debut novel, 'Tanabata Wish'. This one says Tor Teen on the spine because the awards she won for that book and its follow-up, Every Reason We Shouldn't, clearly raised awareness of her talent and she was snapped up by a major. I couldn't be happier to see a local author make it big and I had to check this one out.

What surprised me isn't that it's a decent book, because, of course, it is. What surprised me is how much I enjoyed it, being so far outside of my comfort zone and that's mostly due to two very clear reasons.

Firstly, I didn't dislike anyone—not the lead character, Dakota McDonald; not her best friend for almost her entire life, Leo Matsuda, who is shocked when she tries to kiss him and relegates her firmly into the friend zone; and not even the eventual third wheels who complicate matters, one for each of them. The reason I'm not a romance fan isn't because they're kissing books shorn of all swashbuckling adventure, but because I tend to dislike the characters, both male and female. I've always found them selfish, picky and discardable, which is the absolute last word any romance writer wants readers to associate with a character they're supposed to either identify with or ache for.

Now, I didn't identify with any of these characters because I'm a grandfather and they're all teenagers, and I didn't ache for Koty McDonald, which is good because that would have been weird. However, I felt like she was eminently worthy as a character, someone struggling to remain grounded given a celebrity life that she never asked for, and someone whose feelings for her best friend simply grew as she did. It can't remotely be a spoiler to point out that she ends up with Leo and I was happy for her, even if it took him far too long to wake up and smell the cinnamon rolls. OK, maybe I identified with him just a little on that front. My brain simply doesn't process flirting when it's done to me, so I'm good at oblivious.

Secondly, while the book exists to get Koty and Leo together at the end, Fujimura builds their world in a far more substantial manner than I ever expected from a YA romance. They each have lives of their own and both of those lives come with responsibilities. Koty's is more obvious because she's on television, a blessing and a curse, but the responsibilities she has to her parents and the show they present on HGTV are really no different from the responsibilities Leo has to his family and their Japanese restaurant. In both instances, they do what they need to do, but they also try to find a way to find what we might call a work/life balance, an even more awkward concept for them because they're still in school.

For Koty, she was literally born into stardom. Her parents, both forty-six at the time and four years into presenting a DIY show called If These Walls Could Talk, didn't expect to have a daughter, but she showed up anyway and literally grew up on television. That's great for the trust fund, of course, but not so good when her embarrassment at a homecoming dance is spoofed on 'Saturday Night Live'. Leo isn't famous at all, but he grew up doing whatever needed to be done at Matsuda, his family's restaurant, to keep it open and serving up food. Both appreciate their work but also want to escape it, so they can figure out who they are away from the lives they were given.

And it seems pretty obvious from moment one that they'll be doing that together. Koty practically lives at Matsuda, helping out even when it's not Monday when her family dines there like clockwork. She and Leo share a love of Japanese culture, Leo being Japanese American and Koty a quarter Japanese. They enjoy a TV show together called Kitsune Mask, listen to J-pop and study the language. They're planning to visit Japan together too, as part of a trip organised by their school's Japanese Culture Club. It's hard to imagine one without the other, which, of course, is where we kinda-sorta end up when Koty expresses a deeper level of feeling and Leo rebuffs her.

And so we focus on the details, while Koty and Leo either avoid each other or hang out together with a little awkwardness taking the sheen off the good, simple and free times they would otherwise be. And that's where Fujimura's worldbuilding works so well. I don't think romance fans like the scenes where a clearly destined couple completely fail to live up to their promise but they're necessary. After all, how is a couple supposed to get back together if they're not apart to begin with? The middle chunk of the book with Leo dating Lindsay and Koty dating Alex could easily have been an utter waste of space because we know deep inside our soul that neither of those relationships is going to work. What saves it is all that worldbuilding detail.

We never get to see If These Walls Could Talk, of course, and, having not watched 'Fixer Upper', I'm still not entirely sure how it would play, but we get to see behind the scenes and that worked for me. I liked the little details that firm up how different a life Koty has being on this show to the rest of us, like how part of that life is four months adrift because of the time it takes between shooting an episode and its eventual air date, meaning that they celebrate Thanksgiving in August and Christmas in September, to remain "current" on air.

We also don't get to eat at Matsuda, though I guarantee that every reader, whether they get invested in the romance or not, will want to work through their entire menu, but we similarly get to see behind those scenes and that worked for me too. There's a lot less adjustment needed and a lot more good old fashioned hard work, but I appreciated learning about how a restaurant functions just as much as I did how a DIY show functions. In many ways, the romance—or indeed the absence of it as these kids figure things out—was a minor angle for me, even if it would be the primary one for most readers.

I also liked some of the ground that Fujimura covers here. Not only are both leads at least partially of another race, without the book getting preachy at all, but there's an immersion into Japanese culture and cuisine that never gets gimmicky. It's all thoroughly grounded and told very believably. Knowing a little of Sara's background, having met her family, I can understand where that came from but it's still impressive that she could get so much of that down onto the page in such a grounded way. There's also a genderfluid friend for Koty and Leo in Neviah, whose pronouns we learn but who also never becomes preachy or gimmicky, even if their inclusion has to be underpinning for the central self-identity theme. That's clever writing.

And so I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected and for reasons I didn't expect to manifest. Next time I see a book with a pink cover and a title in whatever light shade of teal that happens to be, that details the eventual romance between a couple of teenagers, I should read that too. Nah, maybe not. But I am happy that I picked this one up. It's a lot more than just a local author making good. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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