I found it very difficult to get into this book and was definitely turned off by the main character.

You’ve no idea how much I WANTED to like this book. A main protagonist who isn’t afraid to be promiscuous, and is coming into herself as a lesbian?? YES PLEASE.

However, alas it was just too OTT for my liking. I ended up DNFing @40%

The book had a good set up, it just wasn’t the execution for me.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for a review.

Unfortunately, Sweethearts did not hit the mark for me. I wanted a tale about art, discovering your sexuality, and having your life complicated when your best friend gets pregnant - definitely more exciting than my time in Sixth Form. The two biggest problems I had was that the main character started out as an obsessive bully and that things would be said in the text that simply weren't portrayed: for example, Ingrid would say that Amber was an arrogant girl who loved the spotlight, but that never came across at all.

I found it very difficult to get into this book and was definitely turned off by the main character.

Sweethearts is a fun light read about a young girl named Ingrid, the story mainly revolves around her coming to terms with her sexually and everything that comes with accepting herself. I consider that the main purpose of this book was to let the reader know it is okay to be himself/herself even if it seems difficult at first.

The story follows Ingrid, Summer, Kat, and Amber as they finish high school and decide what to do next with their lives.

I had I few problems with this book:
First, given the fact that not one of the characters is an adult nor emancipated I would suspect there would be parents involved in their lives, even if just for a short sentence but that is not the case.
Second, the writing was not my cup of tea, I get that it is easy to read and all but it lacked a lot of emotional depth overcompensating with descriptions.
Third, dyeing your hair doesn’t give you a new personality. I get that it may give you a little bit more confidence but it doesn’t transform you into an all-new person.
Fourth, the main character is obviously a bully, that would be okay if it was clear that that was what the writer meant, but it isn’t or at least to me it isn’t and that makes the character quite cringy.

Unfortunately, I only enjoyed the portrayal of teen pregnancy, because it talked about serious topics and showed that it is possible for teen parents to get their life together.

Has you can probably tell I didn’t really enjoy the book but the fact that it was quick to read made me not hate it as much in the sense that it didn’t take away much of my time. There a ton of negative aspects to it, more than any strengths I could find. The book kind of fulfills its purpose of trying to make us feel ok with who we are.

I give this book 2/5 stars.
Hope you enjoy it because I didn’t!

Bye, and keep on reading.

The writing and plot of this story really felt juvenile. Of course, I loved the LGBT themes but it all felt really. . . uncomfortable to me? The main character dyes her hair pink and suddenly everyone wants her? And knows she's gay? And she's just an awful person who treats all the people who care about her super awful? I really couldn't get into it and I felt a lot of the stereotypes of LGBT people [Depression, sexual promiscuity, underage drinking] all just a little too...wrong.

Whilst Sweethearts isn't a book that covers new ground, it's definitely a story that will resonate not just with LGBTQ+ youth, but also with anyone reading this.

Everyone at some point has had a crush on their friend, it's a somewhat inescapable rite of passage. Everyone has also felt rejection; whether that be romantically, professionally or personally in some way Sweethearts explores these concepts with care, and delivers a protagonist (and supporting characters) that you really root for. It took a different direction than what I was expecting, but that worked and didn't deter from my enjoyment of it at all. The only thing that didn't really work for me was the last 10% of the book with the final twist. I don't think it really added anything to the story and the same conclusions probably would have happened without it.

Overall, it's a sweet and somewhat raw tale that many people will be able to relate to with its accessibility and subject matter.

I feel like I was reading something a 14 year old wrote on wattpad, the characters weren't likeable,
I had high hopes for this book since it focuses on a girl coming to terms with the fact she's a lesbian but i was let down, i felt things were rushed.

Pleasantly surprised!

I wasn't expecting a laugh-out-loud tale but that is exactly what I got with this fast-paced coming of age novel. The LGBTQ theme was refreshing in that it was not your typical tear-jerker.

This was an okay book. The romances are easy to identify with, and the protagonist's coming out story felt authentic. I feel like this could have been set in college not high school, except for the strong anti-higher education theme throughout. Maybe they could be failing college, or dropping out? To set this in high school is odd, since the teens are essentially mini-adults. The parents are not involved in nearly everything from kicking out pregnant teens, to accepting homeless friends of their kids without question. No parent steps in to help their pregnant child, or to question why a high schooler has easy access to alcohol and is drunkenly crashing at other teen houses. I liked the main romance, and the many feelings of someone just realizing that they are gay and trying to find out what they like. The friendships and the frustrations about higher education are also relatable. Overall it was an easy read as long as you don't think too hard about the plot.

A must read! I read this book in one sitting. It was so well written and if you can see yourself in any of the characters, this book will pull you in quickly. The author speaks for all those youth may be questioning - just like I was. Highly recommend this. I wish this book was around when I was younger.
I received this as an arc for an honest review.

I really loved the self discovery in this book along with the LGBTQIA+ representation it included. The title isn't what I was expecting since I thought it would be more of a love story and it does have aspects of one. I also enjoyed the real issues teens face today included from teen pregnancy to underage drinking as it does occur even if it doesn't occur frequently enough to really be talked about especially with teen pregnancy rates known to be dropping more each year. I also loved that our main character is an artist and the friendship she had with her ex as some exes can still be friends which is again something not really talked about or has a lot of misconceptions surrounding the idea of people being friends post breakup.

I’m still not over how amazingly adorably wonderful this book was!!

Ingrid is an artsy young girl who is slowly coming to terms with being gay whilst also dealing with school, her future and her friends. Throughout the book we see her deal with unreturned feelings, visit a nightclub (a gay one at that) for the first time & also her first experiences with a girl. It’s so beautifully relatable & I only wish I had been able to read this several years ago because it so perfectly captures the muddle that is trying to sort out your feelings when you’re too worried to actually name them.

It’s fluffy, it’s sweet, it has amazing friendships and totally surprised me with who Ingrid ends up with. Sweethearts is a book about self acceptance, identity & truth and it wraps them all up together perfectly.

This novel follows Ingrid’s journey in self discovery, most notably her sexual orientation.

This was an easy, feel good read. Sometimes you just need that. I would honestly recommend reading this book, especially if you are having a book hangover after reading something a little too heavy. This is a great cure for a book hangover. I enjoyed it.

It's not that I didn't enjoy this book. I did. I cared about some of the characters, and I also enjoyed reading a book where although teen pregnancy was featured, it wasn't the source of the book's angst, and was for the most part, not even portrayed particularly negatively. There were several interesting drama-free relationships and a strong focus on friendship, including platonic friendship between characters who had briefly dated when they were younger, which I appreciated.

However, I had a few problems with it, and they were mostly stylistic.

Firstly, there was just a lot going on. The narrator, Ingrid, is having a sexuality crisis. Her best friend is pregnant. She's also applying for art school. Her best friend's boyfriend wants to be an artist too. There's a popular singer / YouTuber involved. Underage drinking and alcohol dependency is a theme.

Having a lot of crises and issues in one book isn't inherently a bad thing. Life rarely has the good sense to give us one thing to deal with at a time, and having different characters balancing their problems simultaneously can be both engaging and realistic. However, I didn't feel like the pacing worked. The book jumped very rapidly from one issue to the next, without ever fully getting to grips with the meat of any of them. I also felt the alcohol plotline was weirdly underdeveloped, and would probably have liked it even less if I hadn't known it was coming from another review.

The pacing was also weird on other levels. Characters were introduced very suddenly -- for example, there was very little indication that Ingrid and Jackson (her best friend's boyfriend) were close friends or even friends at all until suddenly they were hanging out without Summer (her best friend), so it kind of threw me off momentarily.

The catalyst for Ingrid's realisation for her sexuality is that she dyes her hair pink, gets noticed by an artsy queer student, and thus invited to a gay club where she realises... oh, this is my thing.

The pink hair thing? Never really explained. We don't even see the scene where she dyes it, or get any glimpse of her motivations for doing so. It just kind of ... happens. And hey, I relate, I've gone through phases of changing my hair colour every month and cutting it all off because I was stressed and so on, but it still seemed kind of underdeveloped given that it's referenced throughout the book as a turning point in her personality.

Moreover, everyone talks about how much Ingrid's changed recently, but we never really saw enough of her before this happened to know if that's true, so it felt a little understated.

The girl who invites her to the club is Kat who appears out of nowhere, befriends Ingrid (in a somewhat condescending and even occasionally predatory way, as a more experienced person inviting someone confused about their sexuality to start figuring it out), has apparently been watching her for years, and generally just seems dropped into the storyline with very little warning at all. The book isn't very long -- maybe that's part of the reason everything seems so sudden.

Ingrid also has a very bizarre relationship with Amber, a singer whose music Ingrid has been obsessed with for years. We're told -- though we barely see -- that Ingrid has been bullying and otherwise being cruel to Amber for years, despite being obsessed with her, because she's jealous? Or something? But Amber has an eternally forgiving nature and wants to be friends, and there are several heartfelt declarations about this, but... I don't know. It just confused me, and didn't feel particularly realistic. I wouldn't particularly want to be friends with someone who'd been mean to me for years, whatever their reason for it.

Throughout the book, the plot jumps around between the various different issues, with a lot of dialogue that feels... kind of clumsy and overdramatic, to be honest. There are too many heartfelt speeches. Seventeen year olds are not that great at talking about their feelings, in my experience! I mean, maybe these guys are particularly open, but they were still way too articulate about their issues.

Because of this, it was difficult to really engage with the core characters. Don't get me wrong: I liked Ingrid, except for the glimpses of her mean side we saw with regard to Amber, and I related to her a fair bit, especially when she talks about secret feelings of jealousy and bitterness towards her friends despite consciously wanting the best for them. Too real. I liked Jackson and Summer, who had a surprisingly undramatic relationship considering the whole 'teen pregnancy' thing; both were also great friends to Ingrid, even if she was the third wheel.

But I just didn't find their problems convincing enough to deal with them, because I was trying to keep track of too many things at once -- and because so many of the emotions involved seemed very overstated.

That's not to say it was badly written on a sentence level. There were some beautiful descriptions of Ingrid's art and how she feels about it, and some really empowering statements about emotions. But the dialogue and structure needed work.

I did really enjoy the representation. I thought it was great that Kat was portrayed as questioning without having settled on a label yet, and this being a valid approach. Ingrid's art and Amber's music were interesting parts of their characters, and I liked that Summer was a pregnant teenager who didn't view this as the end of the world or a total disaster. I liked that Jackson and Ingrid were able to be friends -- there were a lot of great platonic relationships in this. And of course, F/F relationships are still rare in YA fiction, so I'm never going to complain about those.

But it felt structurally weak and confusing, with characters being introduced too suddenly and the plot jumping around too often, and that stopped me from enjoying it more.

This review is on Goodreads and scheduled to post on my blog in mid February.

I loved this books....it had everything from strong characters to a strong story with enough twists and drama to keep it interesting... I also really liked that it was not clear from the beginning with who Ingrid is going to end up and fall in love with... It is a fun, and in some parts sad, coming out YA novel. The reason why I gave it 4 stars and not 5 is that the whole drinking part was annoying to me... I just don’t like it when characters seem to be that depended on alcohol and those are teenagers... and then the whole bully thing but that was instrumental for the story.

Ingrid is an artist with a hectic life. Her best friend just got some life-changing news, she is applying for a really important scholarship, and she has all these weird feelings that she doesn't know how to deal with. She makes a new friend who shows her how fun life can really be.
I expected an average book about finding yourself, and the author just really blew me away. I fell in love with the characters, and I really felt the emotions they were feeling throughout the story. I am so glad I picked this book up, because I was really impressed with the story, and with the author's impressive ability to make this so much better than your average, run-of-the-mill "finding yourself" mush.

It is always very pleasant to read a female-female relationship since I mostly read male-male.
This story is very fun to read but nothing too captivating. It touches on bullying, alcoholism but honestly I couldnt really FEEL any connection to it. I really wanted to love this but the characters were just fun, nothing more to that, they lacked personality. The writing wasnt my favorite too, it felt like we were going nowhere. I guess the 3 stars are due to the f-f representation.

I haven’t read too many LGBT+ books in my life but I can genuinely say that this book was fantastic! I loved how I could see Ingrid change as a person and find her true identity, especially as she also dealt with her friends pregancy. Personally the story felt so real to me and it was perfect to read

A great YA contemporary looking at lesbianism and what it means to be a teen in Australia. I loved reading a lesbian fiction as they are harder to find than male gay fiction. I liked how well rounded the characters were and by the end of the novel, i really missed reading about Ingrid, baby Adelaide and the hi-jinks and drama that Ingrid's band of friends get into.