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Pepper is experiencing the extreme busyness of life that only a high-achieving senior at a private school can. She spends all her time pushing herself to be the absolute best in academics and on the swim team. Plus, she is trying to take some time here and there to work on the baking blog she and her college-student sister are running together. Not only that, but her parents own a popular restaurant chain that they started as one burger shop a decade earlier, and her mom is pushing hard to take it international.
Jack is a senior at the same exclusive private school in New York City that Pepper attends. He gets good enough grades and is on the dive team, but it’s his identical twin, Ethan, who is hyper-involved and popular. So Jack spends more of his time working at his family’s deli. He’s also learned on his own to build apps, and now his newest one, Weazel, a way for students to communicate anonymously with each other, has gotten very popular at his school. Only he hasn’t told anyone he created it. He is enjoying how well-liked his creation is — and he is enjoying the opportunity he (as “Wolf”) has had through it to get to know a girl at his school he only knows as “Bluebird.”
The two don’t really connect much at school, except for Jack to give Pepper teasing nicknames about how hard she works, but then they end up becoming largely responsible for their parents’ businesses’ Twitter accounts. When Big League Burger introduces a new grilled cheese sandwich, it is suspiciously similar to Girl Cheesing’s old family recipe —and the teens’ snarky jabs at each other’s restaurants erupt into an all-out Twitter war.
Meanwhile, Bluebird and Wolf are supporting each other through the app and wondering who the other is in real life. They’re falling for each other, even as Jack and Pepper go from bitter rivals to friendly rivals to … friends. And maybe even more.
This young adult novel really is cute. It is an updated teen version of “You’ve Got Mail,” and it’s utterly delightful. Pepper and Jack are dealing with all the challenges of their age, with college right around the corner, and jobs and “real life” right after that. They are busy helping their families and feeling obligated to their businesses even as they find themselves frustrated by differing family dynamics. Their tweets and texts are entertaining, as are their interactions with each other IRL. I was thoroughly enchanted.
Rated: Moderate, for one or two instances of strong language and some other uses of moderate and mild language. Sexual content is limited to kissing.
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* I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
