The beginning of this book was good. It had me engaged and wanting to read. The ending was decent, if predictable. But everything else in the middle was incredibly boring.
I'll start by saying I really thought this was going to be a rom-com-esque novel and I think they tried to make it that way with all the references to the iconic rom-com movies of the 80s and 90s, but it did not work. First of all, I feel like we barely got any actual scenes of just Barclay and Christopher interacting and of the ones we did get, I didn't see any chemistry between them.
This might be because I pretty much hated Barclay's character though. He was way to nieve and selfish and narcissistic to be even kind of likable. I couldn't tell what any of his friends saw in him to want to be friends with him. First of all, who in their right mind would think the a small town in Georgia would be completely welcoming of a gay basketball player?? Even if he was the star player, it's obvious that homophobia would be the main reaction and the fact that he didn't expect it shows just how nieve he really is. I understand that he's a teenager and so his feeling like everyone was against him even though it was really only a few people on the team, makes sense but it was still childish and self-centered to quit the team because of it.
Also, his younger sister being more aware of the family's financial struggles than him was just ridiculous. I couldn't exactly tell how old she was but I kept picturing her as like middle school age and that made it even worse. He didn't give a shit about his family or his friends ever. I liked seeing him apologize to them at the end but I still feel like he didn't actually grow as much as he should have.
Anyway, everything this book was trying to do, didn't really work for me and I think most of that was because of how much I didn't like the main character. I definitely should have DNF'd this one.