You Were Made for Me Review

Title: You Were Made for Me
Author: Jenna Guillaume
Published: August 2020
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Readership: Young Adult
Genre: Contemporary
Rating: ★★★.5

I received a copy of Your Were Made for Me from Netgalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

The day I created a boy started out like any other.

Katie didn’t mean to create a boy. A boy like a long-lost Hemsworth brother: six-foot tall with floppy hair and eyes like the sky on a clear summer’s day; whose lips taste like cookie dough and whose skin smells like springtime.

A boy who is completely devoted to Katie.

He was meant to be perfect.

But he was never meant to exist.

I really loved Jenna Guillaume’s debut novel What I Like About Me – it was a fun, young adult contemporary read that addressed a lot of issues teens (particularly teen girls) face in our current day and age. I was really eager to see what Guillaume would do in her follow-up novel and I think she hit on a really interesting idea for the book.

Katie is sixteen, has a crush on the star of her high school’s football team and is persona non grata to the queen of the school. She’s an artist and writer and daydreams about her perfect boyfriend and her first kiss… and then accidentally creates him overnight with the help of her best friend. He’s the perfect boy: gorgeous, funny, kind and utterly devoted to her. But is it really what she wants?

There are a lot of things to like about this #LoveOzYA rom-com – it’s short, sweet and hits on a lot of insecurities teen girls have around boyfriends, relationship and school. There’s great representation of friendships – between girls and also between girls and boys – and also characters who have the courage to stand up to bullies.

It’s cute, and quirky, and Katie and Libby accidentally creating the perfect boy, called Guy, is adorable. (As is Guy, to be honest.)

Katie’s on a journey to figure out what she really wants, and that includes ups and downs in her romantic life, with her friends and with her family. There’s drama, non of it unsolvable, and a lot of laughs to be had.

In theory, this would be my perfect YA contemporary romance, but one aspect really kept pulling me out of the story and that was the narration style.

Katie is telling us the events that took place leading up to the creation of Guy all the way through to the end of the story. She’s writing it down, recording it for history’s sake, and Libby, her best friend is helping. I don’t have an issue with that, but there are times when both Katie and Libby ‘speak’ to the reader and have conversations with each other and it really stopped the flow of the story for me. I understand it’s more of a comedic element, and perhaps the formatting of the e-Arc didn’t help in this case, but it was hard to tell the different in type between the main narrative and this on-going present-day conversation between the two characters and after a while it started to put my off.

So, while that part of the storytelling style bothered me, the rest of the book was just a fun contemporary romp about wish-fulfilment.

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