Author: Amy Noelle Parks
Publication Date: 5 January 2021
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Page Count: 368
Reading Method: Digital ARC
Synopsis:
Seventeen-year-old Evie Beckham has always been too occupied with her love of math and frequent battles with anxiety to want to date. Besides, she’s always found the idea of kissing to be kind of weird. But by senior year, thanks to therapy and her friends, she’s feeling braver than before. Maybe even brave enough to enter the national math and physics competition or flirt back with the new boy. Meanwhile, Evie’s best friend, Caleb Covic, has always been a little in love with her. So he’s horrified when he is forced to witness Evie’s meet-cute with the new guy. Desperate, Caleb uses an online forum to capture Evie’s interest—and it goes a little too well. Now Evie wonders how she went from avoiding romance to having to choose between two—or is it three?—boys.
Review:
This is a very cute story with a few issues. In The Quantum Weirdness of the Almost Kiss we follow Evie and Caleb as they try to navigate friendship, romance, and a super intense science/math competition.
Evie isn’t interested in romance – or she wasn’t, until she starts to have feelings for a classmate. The problem is that Caleb has been in love with Evie since forever. Though he feels he has made his intentions towards Evie clear, he is understandably hurt when it seems she doesn’t feel the same way. But with the revelation that she is romantically interested in someone else, Caleb feels he needs to make moves to let her his feelings again. So he creates an online profile through the competitions website to woo her.
I am always down for a friends to lovers romance, especially when they are done right. This one fell a little flat for me for a couple reasons. Caleb came across possessive on several instances and it almost felt like he thought he was entitled to Evie’s love. Because of this, he couldn’t just let her be happy in her relationship and created so many unnecessary problems for her. I also didn’t love that even though Evie was in a relationship, Caleb and Evie’s closeness seemed to cross some boundaries. It would be one thing if Evie’s partner was okay with it, but he made it pretty clear that he didn’t care for it and they all just brushed him off.
I will say that I did enjoy the story overall. The characters were interesting, the plot kept continually pushing forward, and it was clear the author had an understanding of the topics the characters were researching – something I have very little knowledge of. It was interesting to see how their project evolved throughout the book.
