seriously romantic: resisting the rebel by lisa brown roberts

resisting the rebel irresistibly uses the opposites attracts theory of story-telling. even better for me, it also uses the fake-relationship-turns-real method. obviously, i loved it. it has all the right ingredients and characters you can root for.

i mean, this plot is right up my alley. bad boy caleb torrs can't help being sucked in by mandy pennington's orbit of hippy-dippy disco cheer. there's no reason he should feel compelled to help her, but he is. and he's also really attracted to her even though she is not his type. she's a joiner. he's a loner. she's been madly in love with her best friend from kindergarten, he's got a stalker ex-girlfriend. this is how fake relationships are born. she'll get a boy to make her friend jealous, he'll get a girl to let the ex know he's moved on.

both caleb and mandy end up getting way more than they expected when they launch their crazy plan. for one, caleb can't pretend to be the boyfriend of the person planning spirit week and avoid helping out. meanwhile mandy finds that she is drawn to caleb way more than she should if she is so into gus, her best friend. then her other two friends seem to be more #teamcaleb than #teamgus. and caleb starts pushing her to change up their agreement from fake to real. but he's so volatile that she doesn't trust what he's telling her.

it's a real mess. and in spite of the teenage angst and melodrama, and the real issues the characters deal with. his abandonment issues, her adhd and dysgraphia, they somehow manage to pull it together. the "prom-posal" scene is great. it's such a comedy of errors, and everything that can go wrong does go wrong, until somehow it comes together.

in the end this book is about two characters who have been through a lot and find a true soulmate in one another. it's the perfect ya summer read.