She Drives Me Crazy so I got her car towed

 

Welcome to this post of She Drives Me Crazy that I'll be honest I don't know where I found out about it, but oh well. Here we are.

Our blurb says that seventeen-year-old Scottie Zajac can’t catch a break. First there’s the embarrassing loss to her ex-girlfriend in their basketball game of the season, and then she gets into a fender bender with the worst possible person: her head cheerleader nemesis, Irene Abraham. Irene is as mean as she is beautiful, and Scottie makes a point to keep her distance, only their little car accident means the girls are forced to ride together to school. Every day. But when an opportunity arises for Scottie to get back at her toxic ex – and climb the school’s social ladder – she convinces Irene to take part in an elaborate fake-dating scheme that threatens to reveal some very real feelings.

The first chapter has Scottie in a preseason basketball against this team her ex-girlfriend, Tally, is on. She mentions how her team almost always loses, and how she as only just got over Tally. Irene also turns up, and you find out that as a prank, she got Scottie’s car towed, which Scottie ended up trying to chase down, until she fell in the street. Tally was there apparently and was more bothered in trying to get Scottie to shut up instead of making her feel better. And then as Tally is leaving, Scottie vows to beat her this season. Anyway, then Irene backs into Scottie’s car because she’s not looking and that’s the fender bender. Both of their mum’s show up, and Scottie doesn’t want to rat on Irene for getting her car towed the first time so accidentally says she spilled coffee in her car once, so their mums think they’re already friends. When they start carpooling, people’s opinion of Scottie starts to improve.

In the beginning, both Scottie and Irene are horrible to each other. Like, they just say some of the nastiest stuff, and to be honest, I kind of understood why the both of them were saying it. Scottie’s only major interaction with Irene was Irene getting her car towed, so I can understand why Scottie would say the stuff she said, especially when Irene made no effort to come across as anything other than this callous, know-it-all kind of person. It was the case of you could tell that she was doing it because it was as though she had to keep up this appearance for one reason or another. But they start fake dating after Scottie accidentally overhears how atrocious Irene’s life is going. Scottie can pay Irene’s insurance deductible that her parents are making her pay back and Scottie can then use Irene to get Tally jealous.

Anyway, like I just mentioned, there’s fake dating in this book. If anyone knows anything about me and romance books, fake dating is in fact my favourite trope, and I did just explain the concept of it in the above paragraph. I could tell that, even just from these first bits, and with the two main characters being on the cover, it was absolutely going to be the case of every other fake dating book – which I love personally. The two were obviously going to learn more about the other whether they wanted to or not and would then end up realising the other isn’t actually as horrible as they’ve initially come across.

Something I like about romance is that since I’ve consumed so much of it, I’ve started to recognise some of the tropes and things that happen, outside of the basic major tropes. It’s like when a character will do something, you can already see what’s going to be the outcome. There was a point in this book where Scottie goes off somewhere with Tally, and I just knew exactly what was going to happen in the instance. This book truly followed that pattern of just because a book is predictable, that doesn’t mean that it’s bad. I saw what was coming in this book, and I didn’t care, I just enjoyed it.

I can’t lie, and I don’t know what it was about this book, but I didn’t find myself making many notes while reading it. Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. I know from one perspective, it was because I found this book so easy to read. And I mean this as a positive. It was a book that found its lane, knew what it was doing, and then just stuck to it. I feel like from time to time, you’ll come across a book that feels really pretentious, and I don’t just mean that in the sense of it uses big words to make itself seem deeper than it actually is, I more mean it in the way that sometimes you can just tell. Like maybe something wants to be more than it actually is. Again, this book knew its lane and the space it deserved to take up, then took it. It never tried to be anything more than this fake dating, enemies/rivals to lovers kind of book.

And now, I don’t know if it was the way that I read this book, but I don’t remember all that much about Scottie, besides that she played basketball and her family. It fully may have been me, but I don’t remember if she had any hobbies. I remember that she liked grand romantic gestures like the ones you see in romance shows and movies, but I don’t remember things like what kind of music she liked. I know things like that aren’t necessary, but they’re the kinds of details that I personally like. Conversely, there was a lot of showing in the way that Scottie acted. I remember seeing a post or a tweet that said something like, “take personality quizzes as your characters to get to know them better”. The kind of thing where you’d put yourself in their shoes and answer the questions as them. I know there was one that asked how they would deal with a spider. And I feel like the author had done this with Scottie. We saw a lot of the way she handled situations and whether she did it well or not. That was something I really appreciated.

I know I typically will have more to say about a book, it was just, like I mentioned before, I didn’t find myself making a lot of notes about this book while I read. It was one of those that I enjoyed, like it was good and I’ll definitely re-read it at some point. But I think it’s going to be one of those that’ll live on my shelf and I’ll re-read it once I’ve forgotten literally everything about it so I can experience it again.

Okay, bye!