This is the most heterosexual queer romance I've ever read (I Think I Love You review)

 

Today I’m talking about a book that has been one of those that I couldn’t tell you where I picked it up, but it’s been sat on my bookshelf for maybe a year or so and I finally got around to reading it. And that book is I Think I Love You by Auriane Desombre.

The blurb says that Emma is a die-hard romantic. She loves meet-cute movies; her pet, Lady Catulet; and writing the gay rom-com of her dreams for the film festival competition she and her friends are entering. If only they’d listen to her ideas… Sophia is pragmatic. She’s into boycotts, namely (1) relationships, (2) boys and BO (reason #2,347,683 she’s a lesbian), and (3) Emma’s nauseating ideas. Forget starry-eyed romance, Sophia knows what will win: an artistic film with a message. Cue the drama. The movie is doomed before they even start shooting… until a real-life twist unfolds behind the camera when Emma and Sophia begin seeing each other through a different lens. Suddenly their rivalry feels like an actual rom-com.

It very much sounded like, from this blurb, that it was going to be some kind of mild rivals to lovers. It sounded as though they had some kind of link to one another, with them working on the movie together, but they perhaps weren’t the closest. That was my first thought going into the book.

Chapter one opens on Emma having just received an email about a fully funded trip to LA from her school, which is the prize for this film contest. It also comes with a scholarship to pay for tuition to a film school. And she also ties her hair into a messy bun… werk. That should have been my first warning. She then also goes to this coffee shop where a bunch of her friends conveniently are at so she can tell them about the contest. She then mentions how she’s glad one of her friend’s (Matt) best friend, Sophia, is in Paris for the year, so she doesn’t make things awkward. But then Sophia turns up in the coffee shop. If she didn’t, I doubt there’d be a plot to the book, so snaps for Sophia for turning up. Basically, the tea between the girlseses is that when Emma came out as bi, everyone assumed that she and Emma would get together because Sophia was the only other out queer girl in their year, and Emma resented the idea of Sophia. To be honest, it seems like the only thing Sophia actually did wrong was hate relationships/rom-coms (in Emma’s eyes).

Chapter two pops over to Sophia’s POV. She’s been in Paris because of her parents’ divorce, and she managed to lose her only friend in Paris due to romance. She also thinks that doing an artsy thing for the contest is the only way she’ll manage to get back into the friend group she’s been away from, despite the fact Emma wants to do a rom-com. I will say, that was logic I didn’t understand. She thought her way back into the group was to argue? Ma’am, that makes no sense, but you know what? No judging her for it. Even then, she was definitely the more interesting of the two leads. With all that she had going on, I could at least understand why she felt the way that she felt – I felt as though she had reason to feel the way she did.

That is something I couldn’t really say for Emma a lot of the time. Something that struck me was just how badly she thought love wasn’t going to happen for her, and I didn’t understand why. Like, she’s bi, has the capability to be attracted to anyone, but she just seemed so certain of the fact love wasn’t going to happen for her. I could understand if she were a lesbian and lived in some part of rural America and not a bisexual living in New York City. She just seemed resigned to the fact she wasn’t going to find love, and it was so weird. She mentioned her parents weren’t homophobic, but had some outdated views, which fair enough, that would mean that she wouldn’t want to come out to her family. That didn’t mean she wasn’t allowed to find love at all. And that connection to romance seemed to be the majority of her personality as well. At least Sophia had other things pop up, a love of Star Wars, being a bit of a gamer. Emma just… didn’t.

Emma was very much the kind of character who refused to admit that two things can be true at once, and that annoyed me about her. That is a characteristic in general that irritates me. But as the book went on, especially in the second half, Emma just grated on me more and more because that one line of thinking she had just never changed. I just didn’t like her as a character. At least Sophia managed to be, for lack of better phrasing, real. Even though Sophia definitely wasn’t perfect (as a person), she was able to own her shit and admit that two things could be true. When she was in the wrong, even though all the characters were dramatic teenagers, she was able to see things from both sides and had some sensibility to her. Even if she was a little dramatic, to an extreme, at points, she was probably the best character in the book. She had the depth that Emma was missing, and I actually enjoyed reading Sophia’s bits.

For a queer romance, it felt really heterosexual. Like, this was meant to be a book about two girls getting together, so why was there, and I mean this nicely, but why was there so much heterosexuality? There were genuinely moments in the second half of the book where I questioned whether Emma and Sophia were even the main characters, because it really didn’t feel like it. There were legitimately moments where they were side characters to the conflict that went on with who were supposed to be the side characters in the book.

There’s a whole plot with these two side characters, Kate and Tom, that felt like it got more page time than Emma and Sophia’s romance to the point, like I mentioned in the previous paragraph, it almost seemed like they were the main characters over Emma and Sophia. Don’t get me wrong, there definitely were a few scenes between Emma and Sophia that were cute, and this book definitely had the potential to be good. I think my biggest thing was that it felt like the focus was put in the wrong places. Like, I did not care about Kate and Tom, or Myrah and Peter, enough for the space they took up in the book. I picked up this book wanting a romance between the two girls, but instead I got a book of teen drama with a side serving of queer romance.

This is going to be a minor spoiler, but it’s something that shows up on page (obviously) fairly early on. It’s that Emma and Sophia’s friend group aren’t happy with Emma and Sophia’s arguing, so the friend group come up with a plot. I won’t say what the plot is, because that would be full spoilers. I loved the idea of this, and when I saw it on the page I did immediately think, “Oh, werk, that’s actually a good idea”. My only issue was that they said what the plot was… They spoiled the plot right then and there. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the plot, I just wish they hadn’t said it when they did, because they make a start on the plot in the literal next chapter. Don’t get me wrong, Emma and Sophia’s friends are painfully obvious about it, so even if they hadn’t said what the plot was, I’d have figured it out, I just think it might have all come off a bit smoother if the readers weren’t explicitly told the plot.

This whole book felt like a bad Netflix original rom-com. It felt like one where Noah Centineo would be in and would end up scoring like a 30% on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s the best way I could describe it.

There were definitely bits I liked. I liked Sophia as a character, the idea of the friend group’s plot, and some of the scenes between Emma and Sophia. It’s just a shame there was so much more that I disliked than I liked. I could have also finished this before 2022 ended, but it got to the point on New Year’s Eve where I just couldn’t be bothered reading anymore and told myself I’d finish it New Year’s Day. And boy… what a bad way to start my 2023. Hopefully whatever I read next will be better than this.

Okay, bye!