I read Blaine for the Win and here's what I thought

 

So, I think Blaine for the Win is my third Robbie Couch book at this point. It was If I See You Again Tomorrow that got me into his books. I’ll be real, that’s exactly the reason I picked this book up, because of another one of Couch’s.

The blurb says high school junior Blaine Bowers has it all – the perfect boyfriend, a pretty sweet gig as a muralist for local Windy City businesses, a loving family, and awesome, talented friends. And he is absolutely, 100 percent positive that aforementioned perfect boyfriend – senior student council president and Mr. Popular of Wicker West High School, Joey – is going to invite Blaine to spend spring break with his family in beautiful sunny Cabo San Lucas. Except Joey breaks up with him instead. In public. On their one-year anniversary. Because, according to Joey, Blaine is too goofy, too flighty, too… unserious. And if Joey wants to go far in life, he needs to start dating more serious guys. Guys like Zach Chesterton. Determined to prove that Blaine can be what Joey wants, Blaine decides to enter the running to become Joey’s successor (and beat out Joey’s new boyfriend, Zach) as senior student council president. But is he willing to sacrifice everything he loves about himself to do it?

Chapter one sees us with Blaine painting a mural on the side of this stationary store when the owner asks him if his anniversary dinner was cancelled, and he mentions to the reader how he has the feeling that the day is going to be one to remember for him as he’s going to have the date of his life. When he’s on the way, he runs into someone he goes to school with, Danny, and accidentally destroys his aloe plant. We do end up finding out that he’s going to this restaurant, Grey Kettle, that’s this super elite place to get into. Blaine also mentions to the reader about how different he and his boyfriend, Joey, are, and how they shouldn’t fit together and that maybe his aesthetic doesn’t fit somewhere like Grey Kettle. Then obviously Blaine gets dumped, and Joey blows up, saying some horrible stuff and immediately regretting it. I will say, even though you do see Joey immediately regret it, I think it was a really good way in immediately getting us on Blaine’s side and then seeing Joey as the bad guy, even if he wasn’t horrible. I mean, he was horrible, but since he regretted it, it didn’t paint him as a complete and utter monster.

So not to be mean to Blaine, but he was unserious. But that’s kind of what I liked about him. Sure, he was unserious, but managed to be serious when he needed to be. The main point I’m getting at here is that he had personality dripping out of just about everything that he said. And, the order that I’ve made these posts public is massively out of order of the way I read the books, and I read this book immediately after Together in a Broken World that had the opposite problems of none of the characters having a voice, so reading this afterwards, I felt safe in what I was reading in this book, like I knew the characters were going to be distinguishable from one another. Like, I just could hear Blaine’s voice in the narration. One of my favourite moments, because this is the exact kind of way I like to write, is the start of chapter 13 when Blaine is getting ready to give a speech. The very first paragraph is him narrating about how nervous he is, then when his friend Camilla asks him if he’s nervous, he just straight up says no. Like I love stupid stuff like that.

There’s this guy, Danny, that Blaine runs into and destroys his aloe plant in the beginning of the book who then shows up again when Blaine is trying to get signatures for his presidency run. Given that he showed up multiple times in the first 70 pages, that did immediately push me to the thought of that he’d end up with Blaine, and the whole arc Blaine could go on would be that he realises that he doesn’t want Joey back after all. I figured that perhaps even though Blaine was going to get deep into the race, he’d realise part way through that because he didn’t want Joey back, so he’d maybe give up, or not be too broken up if he ended up losing the election.

Blaine runs his candidacy on mental health because he realised that his main opponent was running on name alone. You see bits and pieces of the election process, debates, things leading up to it, the election day, but it never felt super heavy, which was something I appreciated about this book. I don’t, personally, have that much interest in the inner workings of how elections work. I have my beliefs, but I have no interest in going into politics myself, so I don’t need the electoral process in a book to be super details or realistic. But also, it was a high school election, it was basically that Blaine had to get enough signatures to prove he wasn’t just running for the fun of it, get enough people on student council to vote for him, do a single debate, then it was the vote. I realise that’s four steps, but they’re all simple. An idiot like me was able to follow it.

When the major conflict of the book started, it did take me a minute to actually resonate with it. But weirdly, it was Danny’s father, Bao, and something he said at the end of one of the chapters just as the conflict was happening that made it click so quickly. I feel like in books, more often than not, when you have a singular main character, you only see things from their perspective, and I think that Couch did such a good job in showing us the issues from Blaine’s perspective that it made me feel the same as Blaine did once the conflict started to happen. I think I definitely learned and understood quicker than Blaine did, but obviously, I wasn’t going through what he did and had the opportunity to see things externally. To him, everything is just happening to him, so obviously everything is about him. Then because I’m reading and seeing everything, I can pick up on the fact that maybe that’s not true, Ellen.

To keep on this path, with Blaine being so one-track minded, it did let me see the way that the other characters were that he wasn’t. Trish, one of his besties, was one of these specifically. I think she was definitely the most relevant of his friends – and I mean that in the sense that she was just the most present throughout the book. She ends up being Blaine’s campaign captain, so she’s there for everything throughout the campaign that Blaine is. It ended up being the case that Blaine’s narrow-mindedness meant that he wasn’t seeing the things that were going on with his friends that, and even though that also meant that we didn’t get everything we were still able to see things that were going on with these side characters.

And the last bit I wanted to mention was just how realistic Blaine was. You see the whole journey he goes on with himself throughout the candidacy. Obviously, he starts running with the intention of getting Joey back alongside of having this mental health skew to his race. Then you see what happens when he gets deeper into the race when it’s more just about Joey. I liked that you saw how Blaine really felt about himself and the concept of being in politics.

Overall, I think If I See You Again Tomorrow is still my favourite Robbie Couch book – that one gagged me – but I still enjoyed this one. It’s another one I’d definitely recommend giving a read.

Okay, bye!