Saturday Short: I Like Him, He Likes Her

Goodreads Summary: Find a Penny pick it up and all day long you’ll have good luck…except, of course, if that Penny is charming and pretty and funny, and the person picking her up just happens to be your boyfriend. Alice McKinley’s freshman year is not as “lucky” as she was hoping it would be. But she’s is trying to look on the bright side. There are worse things than being single for a semester… for a school year…for the whole summer…. At least Alice can count on her best friends for support—in theory, anyway. Lately they haven’t been all that there-for-her. In fact, it seems like Pam and Liz are suddenly involved in intense, secret conversations whenever Alice is around.

Single is starting to feel a whole lot like solo.

I Like Him, He Likes Her is a bind-up of books 13-15 in the Alice Series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor which means that its late in the series, close to the last three books but I was told that it would work as a standalone and to some extent it did...but because I hadn't read the previous books I wasn't quite as attatched to the characters as I might have been and that made it very easy to put down since characters are such a big deal for me in the things that i read. Also it didn't help that some of the major plot points of previous books were mentioned, with maybe only a sentence of two of description, and left me wondering. Not quite enough to pick up the other books though.

The characters were interesting and I especially enjoyed the interactions between Alice and her brother because they didn't have quite the typical, average brother/sister relationship. They were both something more to each other and I really loved seeing those family ties. You just don't get enough of them in most MG/YA novels because they are so fixed on showing you what is going on with the protagonist and how they manage solo.

Overall I'd say if you had picked this one up, I'd highly recommend either hitting the library or the bookstore and getting the previous installments. It was an alright story, interesting enough and went by fairly fast but wasn't quite what I was expecting.

2/5