Recommended Reading

Gr 9 Up–Bobby Ashton has big plans for the summer before college—including making a grand gesture to the boy he loves and recording it for the world to see. The one thing Bobby loves even more than the boy is the idea of love and all the swoonworthy tropes in romance novels. But plans go off the rails immediately, and the epic fail of his declaration leads to a bookstore window crashing and Bobby finding out that the love of his life has friend-zoned him. How did he read everything so wrong? Taking inspiration from Jane Austen’s Emma and a little bit of the film The Shop Around the Corner, Coccia creates an entertaining world where Bobby sees the sparks flying between the people he meets, but not when it pertains to himself: for instance, he thinks there is no way his friend, the perfectly beautiful Luke, could ever love someone who looks like him. As Bobby gains confidence in his romantic matchmaking skills and his book-matching skills (at his job at Corner Books) he begins to learn that maybe he shouldn’t judge a person by the cover—including himself. This is a beautiful body positive story with unquestioned LGBTQIA+ acceptance. Readers will laugh at the antics Bobby seems to always find himself in and also feel his angst as he learns to love himself and find his own epic love story.