ARC Review: Meet Cute Diary by Emery Lee

Review by: Paige

Rating: ★ ★ ★ .5

I received an advanced copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. Thank you so much to Quill Tree Books for providing this galley!

Publication: May 4, 2021

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance

Synopsis: Felix Ever After meets Becky Albertalli in this swoon-worthy, heartfelt rom-com about how a transgender teen’s first love challenges his ideas about perfect relationships.

Noah Ramirez thinks he’s an expert on romance. He has to be for his popular blog, the Meet Cute Diary, a collection of trans happily ever afters. There’s just one problem—all the stories are fake. What started as the fantasies of a trans boy afraid to step out of the closet has grown into a beacon of hope for trans readers across the globe.

When a troll exposes the blog as fiction, Noah’s world unravels. The only way to save the Diary is to convince everyone that the stories are true, but he doesn’t have any proof. Then Drew walks into Noah’s life, and the pieces fall into place: Drew is willing to fake-date Noah to save the Diary. But when Noah’s feelings grow beyond their staged romance, he realizes that dating in real life isn’t quite the same as finding love on the page.

In this charming novel by Emery Lee, Noah will have to choose between following his own rules for love or discovering that the most romantic endings are the ones that go off script.

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Review: If I had to use only one word to describe Meet Cute Diary, it would be “joy.” This is a book that truly radiates it, and I believe its readers will feel it palpably and tangibly. It is a story about joy, about finding, creating, and deserving it. But most importantly, I think it is a story that will bring joy to its trans readers, and it will be all the more important for having done so.

I want to start by noting what I think is undoubtedly the most important facet of this book: its open and honest discussions and explorations of gender identity, gender experiences, gender fluidity, and pronoun usage. I had never encountered neo-pronouns in fiction before, and I imagine that many young, queer, and questioning readers will be greatly impacted by it; it is such an invaluable experience to put plainly on the page. As a cisgender woman, I certainly cannot speak to the trans representation in this novel and will leave more comprehensive discussion to those readers who can speak to it far better than me, but it was not lost on me how important this is and will continue to be. Showing readers the host of gender expressions and experiences available to them is integral.

At this point, my love for fake dating needs no introduction. It was the first element of this book that hooked me, and I loved watching the drama unfold in its own unique way. While I do wish the “fake” had kept up for a bit longer, there’s a solid and clear reason why it didn’t. I loved that Lee played with the fake dating trope, and romance tropes in general, in such a meta way through Noah’s “Meet Cute Diary” Tumblr blog, and the whole blog plot panned out in a fulfilling and consistenly interesting way. There’s definitely something to be said here about Meet Cute Diary‘s exploration of young peoples’ online experiences, and the simultaneous comfort and harm that can come with being perpetually online (which I certainly know a lot about myself)—in fact, I wish that aspect/criticism had been amped up a bit.

However, as the story went on, I found myself increasingly frustrated with Noah’s characterization. As I’ve made clear, I’m not one to throw the “this character is immature” card, and I think Noah’s “immaturity” was simply his being 16-years-old and frustrated by life. But what I couldn’t give as much leniency towards was Noah’s persistent selfishness and inability to learn and correct for that, even when it was explicitly called out for him. Despite his supposed learning that his selfish behaviors were harmful, I kept seeing the same patterns repeated in his language, and it got to grating on me.

On top of that, while I want to keep spoiler-free as much as possible, his relationship with Drew really frustrated me on a structural level. I think showing that the “perfect romance” is somewhat of a hoax is absolutely important and half the project of this book, but I wish that Lee had more directly laid out that Noah and Drew’s relationship was exceedingly unhealthy. It was certainly alluded to enough, but it should’ve been more plain for young readers, in my opinion. I’m glad the book moved on from it, but I can only hope young readers saw its toxicity for what it was.

But ultimately, Meet Cute Diary was such a joyous novel. We need more books like this, books that take all the rom-com sugary sweetness and happiness that cis, straight people get in love stories over and over again and provide them for queer characters and readers. This is undoubtedly a book of and about trans joy, and we should all celebrate that.