Review: Everyone Hates Kelsie Miller by Meredith Ireland

Everyone Hates Kelsie Miller by Meredith Ireland


Recommended: eh…
If you can be ok with an MC / narrator who is actually an unlikeable dick, if you enjoy academic rivals, if you enjoy mini road trips, then this might work for you. If any of that turns you off… probably pass

Summary

Today Tonight Tomorrow meets A Pho Love Story in this whip-smart young adult novel about a girl who embarks on a road trip with her long-time rival to win back her best friend and his girlfriend.

There’s no one Kelsie Miller hates more than Eric Mulvaney Ortiz—the homecoming king, captain of the football team, and academic archrival in her hyper-competitive prep school. But after Kelsie’s best friend, Briana, moves across the country and stops speaking to her, she’ll do anything, even talk to Eric, to find out why.

After they run into each other—literally—at the last high school party of the summer, Eric admits he’s been ghosted by his girlfriend, Jessica. Kelsie tells him she’s had zero contact from Briana since she left their upstate New York town.

Suddenly, a plan is formed: they’ll go on a road trip to the University of Pennsylvania the following week when both Briana and Jessica will be on campus. Together, they’ll do whatever it takes to win back their exes.

What could go wrong?

Used to succeeding in everything, Kelsie and Eric assume they’ll naturally figure out the details on the drive down. What they don’t expect is that the person they actually need may be the one sitting next to them.

Thoughts

The main problem here is that I finished this book 4 days ago and I’ve already almost forgotten it. That alone tells me that it’s not anything wildly special to me, if four days have already let it slip away. I acknowledge as part of that, though, that two things went against this for me immediately:
1. I’m not a fan of road trip stories, which this is like 35% a road trip story
2. I’m not a fan of enemies to lovers where it’s really that one person is just an asshole and there was never actually any animosity needed or present for the other person

The road trip portion is blessedly short, which I was super grateful for because a story entirely in a car is a hard sell for me. Once they get out of the car again I was more into it and able to sink in to the characters a bit more. There were definitely a few moments that made me smile in mild amusement, but there were also moments that were so legitimately unbelievable that they just seemed stupid and forced.

The larger issue though, which I have used self control to avoid mentioning until paragraph THREE of this review, is that I too hate Kelsie Miller and am totally on board with “everyone” from the title. She’s actually, legitimately, an asshole. I wouldn’t be friends with this person and would avoid her in social situations. Now, by the end, she acknowledges some of these flaws and resolves to change them — but this is a book, and for 90% of it she was totally unlikable to me.

The crux of her issue is that she’s a person who thinks you only apologize when you are factually wrong about something that another person was factually correct about. This made me want to scream, especially after just reading This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships by Matthew Fray which focuses sooo much on how apologizing is for when you’ve hurt someone and it’s not about WINNING or being RIGHT you fucking asshole!

Sorry.

So anyway, I didn’t like the MC and didn’t like the framing of their “enemies” portion because it wasn’t that they were enemies, she’s just a total self-centered dick. Now I guess to be fair, this lends more credibility to this story having a redemption arc because boyyy did she need it. Still though — having to be in the head of this kind of person was terrible and unenjoyable. I guess that means it was written well?

In short, if you can get over the fact that MC is one of those awful people who don’t even realize they’re a total dick, and if you also enjoy light-road-trip stories with some love and lust tangled in, you’ll probably enjoy this (or at least more than I did).