My Ramblings on The Way You Make Me Feel by Maurene Goo

Title: The Way You Make Me Feel
Author: Maurene Goo
Release Date: May 8, 2018
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Author Website

Summary: 
From the author of I Believe in a Thing Called Love, a laugh-out-loud story of love, new friendships, and one unique food truck.

Clara Shin lives for pranks and disruption. When she takes one joke too far, her dad sentences her to a summer working on his food truck, the KoBra, alongside her uptight classmate Rose Carver. Not the carefree summer Clara had imagined. But maybe Rose isn't so bad. Maybe the boy named Hamlet (yes, Hamlet) crushing on her is pretty cute. Maybe Clara actually feels invested in her dad’s business. What if taking this summer seriously means that Clara has to leave her old self behind? 

With Maurene Goo's signature warmth and humor, The Way You Make Me Feel is a relatable story of falling in love and finding yourself in the places you’d never thought to look. 

My Ramblings: 
From about mid-February until May I had a run of not great books. They weren't horrible, but nothing was catching my attention enough to really get into. I would start a book, read a chapter or two, set it down and never come back. The The Way You Make Me Feel showed up and it was like a little turning point, over the month of May and into June I finished 8 books, all of them great, and it started with this book. Before I get into my thoughts on the book- first I have to say that I subscribed to Uppercase Box (a new book in my mailbox every month!), 3 of my past 8 books came from Uppercase Box, so far almost every book that has come has been a winner. If you are into signed YA books just showing up every month (for not that much money), check out their website. 

Okay- now for the book. What was it that made this one the book that broke the streak? For starters, it was just so relatable. Clara, the main character, is a pretty normal girl, serving her sentence for a prank gone awry at her fathers food truck for the summer with her mortal enemy. There is nothing overly out of the box in this story, just a girl really figuring out who she is and who she wants to be. When done right, I'm a complete sucker for these kinds of stories, and Goo really got this story right. Clara is flawed, so are Rose (the enemy) and Hamlet (potential love interest), but they are all also good kids. The parents aren't perfect, but they aren't horrible either. Everyone is just trying to do their best with the situations presented to them... which I think sums up most people's lives, which is why this book works so well. You can see yourself in the characters and quickly become invested in how it will all turn out. 

The best part is that there are no easy wins for these characters. To get what they want, they have to work for it. Even then, it doesn't always work out how they plan. And that's okay, because that's life. Goo did a phenomenal job with this one and I can't wait to read more from her!