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A review by isabelbrieler
Only Mostly Devastated by Sophie Gonzales
4.0
Grease, but make it good
I was a little torn going into this because it has a weird combination of things I like and things I don't. Retellings? Love em. Grease the musical? Keep it away from me. High school contemporaries? Sometimes, maybe, if you do it well.
Suffice it to say, I was pleasantly surprised by Only Mostly Devastated.
The story follows Ollie as he spends the summer in North Carolina with his family to be there for a terminally ill Aunt, and ends up staying there for the year. After their summer fling, Will ghosts him as soon as the two separate, but the two soon reconnect as Ollie starts senior year at a new school.
This book was a charming, quick read that left me absolutely satisfied. Gonzales took all of the parts of Grease that I hated and, in modernizing the story, smoothed them over and allowed me to enjoy myself. Ollie and Will's relationship isn't necessarily ~cute~ in the way you might expect from a contemporary romance, but it feels real, and the development of that relationship (and consequently of the two as people) was engaging and, of course, heartwarming in the end.
So much of Grease is about, obviously, these two messy, entangled friend groups, which I think Gonzales did pretty well. In sticking only with Ollie's perspective we focus significantly more on his friends rather than Will's which I did not mind one bit since all of Will's friends were pretty obnoxious. By focusing on just one friend group, though, those relationships and characters were explored more deeply, and I really enjoyed them. Lana, in particular, was probably my favorite character (although that's definitely just because I related to her the most).
All in all, Only Mostly Devastated succeeded in everything it set out to do. I was never frustrated or bored while reading, and in fact, rushed through a few aspects of my day today in order to finish it sooner.
ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley
I was a little torn going into this because it has a weird combination of things I like and things I don't. Retellings? Love em. Grease the musical? Keep it away from me. High school contemporaries? Sometimes, maybe, if you do it well.
Suffice it to say, I was pleasantly surprised by Only Mostly Devastated.
The story follows Ollie as he spends the summer in North Carolina with his family to be there for a terminally ill Aunt, and ends up staying there for the year. After their summer fling, Will ghosts him as soon as the two separate, but the two soon reconnect as Ollie starts senior year at a new school.
This book was a charming, quick read that left me absolutely satisfied. Gonzales took all of the parts of Grease that I hated and, in modernizing the story, smoothed them over and allowed me to enjoy myself. Ollie and Will's relationship isn't necessarily ~cute~ in the way you might expect from a contemporary romance, but it feels real, and the development of that relationship (and consequently of the two as people) was engaging and, of course, heartwarming in the end.
So much of Grease is about, obviously, these two messy, entangled friend groups, which I think Gonzales did pretty well. In sticking only with Ollie's perspective we focus significantly more on his friends rather than Will's which I did not mind one bit since all of Will's friends were pretty obnoxious. By focusing on just one friend group, though, those relationships and characters were explored more deeply, and I really enjoyed them. Lana, in particular, was probably my favorite character (although that's definitely just because I related to her the most).
All in all, Only Mostly Devastated succeeded in everything it set out to do. I was never frustrated or bored while reading, and in fact, rushed through a few aspects of my day today in order to finish it sooner.
ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley