Come As You Are by Dahlia Adler (2025)
Confession time - I barely suppressed a resigned sigh and eye roll before heading into this one. Another boarding school romance, filled with gossip, hook-ups, break-ups, quirky girls, grumpy guys, villainous mean queens, dumb jocks, heart-of-gold besties, inner turmoil, wardrobe fails, bad hair days, bad parents days, nuclear sibling rivalries..... and kisses that sail right off the Richter scale.
True, all that stuff is duly in place here. But author Dahlia Adler deploys such a wicked sense of humor and telling insights, that by the time I reached the last pages, I was sorry to see it end.
I would've loved spending more time with the perfectly mis-matched Everett 'Evie' Riley and Salem Grayson. Evie arrives at school already a nursing a bruised heart (a loser boyfriend stolen from her by her ultra popular older sister). Adding insult to injury: she's mistakenly assigned to the boys' dorm (only partially corrected by giving her a private room there). But she's never at a loss for memorable comeback repartee aimed at boys who dare to ridicule her as the girl stuck in a sea of testosterone and a variety of foul male odors.
Speaking of boys, in her effort to pursue the elusive goal of being cool, she engages in a pact with Salem, a darkly coiffed, darkly tempered emo guy. He needs to fulfill his parents' expectations of his becoming what's thought of a normal good student.. Their deal: he schools Evie on cool (and maybe even 'bad' a few times) and Evie transforms him into a traditional, socially acceptable boy (even trying out for team sports).
Evie and Salem's agreement, to the surprise of absolutely no readers of this book, goes spinning off in all manner of different directions.....laugh out loud funny and dead on in the depiction of characters finding out who they are and what they want. And I lost count of how many times I wanted to rush out and find friends to quote the hilarious, astute dialogue exchanges here.
If all the boarding/high school opposites-come-together romances were as sharply written and amusing as this one, I'm afraid I'd end up reading three of them per week. Don't pass up this one.
5 stars (*****)
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