Halle has two personalities. Well, not really, but she does have two persona’s. She is everyday Halle who is going to start another new high school, this time while staying with her grandfather in Connecticut. She is also Kels who runs an online blog where she pairs cupcakes with book covers. Kels is much more bold and doesn’t have trouble expressing her thoughts and opinions and has a ton of online friends, including her best friend Nash. When Halle and her brother move in with her gramps and get ready to start school Halle comes face to face with her friend Nash except she doesn’t tell him that she’s Kels. She has every class with him and gets invited to sit with he and his friends at lunch and she’s terrified he will find out and be mad. Is it possible to have a love triangle when two of the people are yourself?

As a book blogger I thought One True Pastry and it’s concept totally cute. I loved the underlying story about the loss of her grandmother and how differently people handle grief. I thought Nash was adorable but thought Halle’s constant rejection of him painful. Of course, I was supposed to feel this way but if I were him I wouldn’t given up on her a long time ago. I loved her brother and his confused bi-sexuality and how to her he was just her brother regardless of how he identified. I liked Halle more than Kels because she had depth and wasn’t one dimensional like Kels. What I hated was the bashing back and forth of who should read YA. This one genre, of them all seems to have a reader identity crisis and this author tied into that. I thought it an interesting dialog within what should have been just another teen contemporary romance. It’s a dialog without a conclusion in real life, but it ran its course on these pages.

There is a reason to read ya novels, especially in the contemporary romance sub-genre. They are a quick escape from whatever is bothering you and typically contain very little depth. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of depth I found in What I Like About You. It held my interest and made me slow down and think. Think about loss, recovery, faith, best friends, love, friendship and family. What I Like About You was particularly insightful and despite my age being outside the target demo (come on, I had to say it!) I enjoyed it very much.

❤️❤️❤️❤️

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