By Emma Dunne
With two girls on the cover of a book titled "Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel," the surge of excitement rushed through my body like a firecracker: a lesbian romance story! I immediately checked the back of Sara Farizan's book and was interested by the short summary talking about a high school girl struggling with her sexuality after meeting an exciting new student. This seemed like a short, sweet, and cheesy teenage novel about two girls falling in love and I was here for it.
To get more into the plot, high school junior Leila kind of feels like an outsider because of her Persian heritage and the fact she is romantically attracted to girls. She lays on the down-low with everybody at her prestigious school because of her insecurities and refuses to share her personal feelings with anyone. This all changes once an enticing new girl joins the school. Saskia is everything Leila wants to be: rich, beautiful, mysterious, and talented. Once they start talking, Leila develops a crush on this girl and even joins the school play after Saskia begs her to.
After Leila joins the play, her life takes a turn for the worst. Saskia is not who she said she was, is jeopardizing the few friendships Leila has, and starts to make her life a living hell. Leila is then forced with the decision on fully pursuing her crush on this mysterious mean girl or keeping the few friendships she has.
Lesbian romance in the Young Adult genre is hard to come by. With my unfortunate experience with this particular subgenre, I have learned well-written lesbian romance with developed and likeable characters is even harder to come across. Unfortunately for my reading experience, Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel is not in the category of well-written lesbian romance.
For starters, Farizan's writing is mediocre at best. I am under the impression that sentences do not have to be long or extraneous to make a wonderful story, but unlike some authors I've read, Farizan does not leave much thought or emotion with her simplistic sentences and I could not relate to the characters because of this. The plot of this story also seemed very promising, but ended up falling flat. There were instances in this book were Saskia quite literally takes advantage of Leila and touches her without her consent, and the author never once talked about how this was assault and a vile thing to do. Leila ends up getting a happy ending, but I couldn't feel any emotion for her because of the writing and how uncomfortable I got from the plot.
Sara Farizan did not dazzle me with her subpar writing and plot full of dubious consent, and it is extremely unlikely I will ever read one of her novels again. If someone is looking for a good LGBT romance story, I would guide them to Benjamin Alire Saenz' Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe or Carrie Mac's 10 Things I Can See from Here and strongly advise them to stay away from this hot mess of a story.
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