TW: Homophobia, grooming, a bit out of touch with dangerous situations, assault, harassment, little cheating and racism.

Spin me Right Round is Back to the future with a positive queer twist that handles a lot more than just the goal of helping prevent a tragedy; it covers racism, homophobia, what faith truly is, the #metoo movement and grooming before it was seen for the danger it is and finding out you can't choose your parents.

I feel that Luis was a tad out of touch with the seriousness of the lgbtq+ situation in 1985; I 100% put it down to character fault as it matched his personality, which I loved and disliked at times.
The problems and scenarios in this book surprised me. It dealt with grooming, feeling good about yourself, homophobia, preventing a tragedy and a school system that was more willing to expel a student and cover up a predator teacher than be more open and loving as their faith asks - it covered a lot and even if it didn't solve it all, which I didn't want it to it brought it light and showed the step to helping.
Also, I could not imagine seeing your parent back in 1985 and seeing them hate everything about you and try and harm you; that is gotta be super messed up. However, a good thing from his trip is the excellent butterfly effects and how things grew and were happier because of him.

Very decent time travel books that I would easily recommend to those who love or are looking for Queer Young Adult Contemporary, especially to those who are just starting to read for fun!

One of several time travel books I read in a row. I liked this one better, still slightly difficult to believe characters but overall an engaging read.

3.5/5 Stars

Spin Me Right Round sounded absolutely amazing. I’ve watched Back to the Future more time than I care to admit, so I was so excited to read a queer book in the same vein.

Unfortunately this didn’t quite live up to my expectations. The book was cute, but the dialogue was a bit cringy at times and I HATED the ending. Overall, it wasn’t bad, but it was a bit of a let down.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a eARC in exchange for a review.

There's something about queer YA books with either a lightly speculative or historical element that almost always manages to steal my heart. This book had both and it was no exception.

What I really loved about this book compared to other time travel books was just how entwined Luis' life was with the past he travelled to. It was so cool to see how Luis interacted with the people in the past who he knew from his future life, and how that ended up changing the future. Of course, the exploration of how queerness is perceived in the two timelines was interesting to read about. The fact that time travel was a theme within both of the timelines themselves was also really interesting and brought a fresh side to the trope.

I loved how nuanced the characters were, and how the often-complicated relationships between them were explored. I just completely fell into the story, especially with the witty way the main character narrated it.

Oh, can I also mention that this book made me miss high school?! Highly recommend, can't wait to see the Valdes' future works!

This story is one that needs to be told, but with that said Luis got on my nerves sometime. He was so full of himself and at first wouldn't take ownership for the things he messed up and blame others for he down fall. How could his plans go wrong he was the most love student in the school, but things happen and he goes back in time. Where he learn about hate and also meet his parents as teens ( personally I don't think I want to see My parents that young.) over all this book hit middle of the road for me, But it see a story that need to be told and maybe if Luis wasn't talking to the readers it would of been fine there other ways to show confidence then telling the readers over I give this story three stars I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it and I see the reason for a story like this, but I will say and spoiler warning just in case trigger warning for homophobia and hate crimes also sexual relationship with a teacher ( off the page).

Luis was a total drama queen in the best way, but let me tell you he handled getting flung back into the very homophobic 80's better than I could have. I really liked the Back to the Future vibes this book as and the getting know the characters in the present and in the 80's. I wish we had gotten and epilogue with a meet up of both worlds but alas! Still a very well done read!

Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for providing me with an arc for an honest review!

This was an okay adventure in time travel to 1985 following a loud and proud gay teen from the present. It was cute, but Valdes obviously does not understand how teens talk from the way the narrator speaks.

I received an advanced copy of Spin Me Right Round through Netgalley so I could share my review with you!

Luis Gonzales wants to go to prom with his boyfriend more than anything else in the world. He can perfectly imagine the moment when he is crowned prom king in front of his whole school, but his dream is still just out of reach. His school, though claiming to be “progressive,” refuses to allow queer couples to attend prom together. If Luis has anything to say about it, that policy will be ending sooner rather than later. But, when a head injury knocks Luis back in time to the year 1985, he realizes that he might just have the chance to save another queer student’s life.

You can get your copy of Spin Me Right Round on January 4th from Bloomsbury YA!

The only real issue I had with this book was how stilted the dialogue portions felt. The story itself was quite engaging and unique, but the style of dialogue often pulled me out of the action. Somehow, the writing just didn’t feel authentic to how teenagers speak. Besides this issue, I quite enjoyed Spin Me Right Round. I especially enjoyed the connecting theme of Queer liberation and battles throughout time that was present at the story’s core. The world needs more queer time-travel novels, so I am very excited for readers to get their hands on Spin Me Right Round!

My Recommendation-
If you love time travel stories like Yesterday is History or Timeless, you should grab a copy of Spin Me Right Round! This book would be a good pick for someone looking for a quick and snappy read to start off their 2022!

This book had me IN TEARS!! Such a good book. If you like time travel, love stories, and coming of age stories, you will love this book!

“Gay YA take on Back to the Future” had me from the first time I saw this premise.

In Spin Me Right Round, Luis has it all figured out. He’s a high school senior who is confident in himself and his ability to create change in his school. He wants to go to prom with his boyfriend (a thing that is not allowed at his school) and everyone mentions the death of a former student as the reason why. Chaz Wilson is a name that Luis has known for years. After a bonk to the head, he wakes up in 1985 at his school and with a very much still alive Chaz Wilson. Now, Luis has the opportunity to save Chaz’s life (while becoming friends with his own mom at the time!) and to change many other lives in the process.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. It is just as much fun and lighthearted as it is heavy. There is beautiful representation across the board and the acknowledgement that it isn’t always safe to be out. There are so many moments that are handled with poignant grace by David Valdes.

I’m also a sucker for good voice when it comes to narrators. For me, Luis was a star. There are a ton of wonderful parenthetical asides, so many quips, and by page 3, I *knew* this character. He grows and changes from the selfish teen at the beginning who feels like the world revolves around him.

The ending ties up just a little too neatly for me and there’s one character meeting that I was expecting that didn’t pan out by the end of the book, but overall, I found this to be a fun and emotionally deep book.

Yet another YA novel riddled with out of touch pop culture references and cartoonish portrayals of teenagers, this was a fun, yet cringey, ride. I did enjoy the general premise, and I thought lots of the banter was fun to read. The book intrigued me, and did a good job of keeping me entertained: I read it all in practically one sitting, and was never bored.

However, it read to me like the author hasn't came within 50 feet of any real-life teenager, and decided to write a kid based on their online proximation of what Gen-Z is like. There are certain novels with many pop culture references that still manage to feel authentic to the age group being written about: Ophelia After All, for example, does a great job of realistically writing 21st century teenagers, and Red White and Royal Blue is very fitting of the *millennial* characterizations deeply entrenched in pop culture. This book did not hit that mark. Not only was the main character extremely selfish and thoughtless, which wasn't ever properly unpacked, but he also acted in a way that no teenager acts in real life.

Still, I really enjoyed the large cast of diverse characters and the plot was fun. 3.5

This book was so sweet, so full of heart, I fell completely in love. And so I am just going to go ahead and explain why.

►Luis. Is. Everything. I love him so very much! He's funny, he's witty, he's charming, and he's just a good guy with a ton of personality. I loved him from the very start. He also grows a ton during the course of the story, because even though he is awesome, he's for sure flawed, just as we all are.

►The other characters are amazing, too! Every single side character was so well developed, I ended up loving them all just as much.

►Time travel is always fun, and this iteration is no different! I mean, it's obviously amusing that Luis went back into the time period of his parents, but there is even more meaning behind it than that. He ends up face to face with the young man who died, becoming his mother's "cautionary tale" when Luis wants to fight for LGBTQ rights at his school. It's certainly not easy for Luis (or the reader) to see how the LGBTQ community was treated during the 80s.

►As Luis's modern day problems show, the world hasn't made as much progress as we absolutely should have. While we do see how extra awful it was in the 80s (especially for gay men in the dawn of the AIDS era, no doubt), the problems Luis is facing with his school's prom illustrate how not a whole lot has really changed, and how messed up that really is. I liked that this book authentically portrayed the situation- that sure there's been progress, but we have a long way to go.

►It's just so emotive and heartfelt. I laughed, I cried, I just flat out enjoyed it. I was so completely invested in the outcome of all the characters, that I couldn't put it down. And yeah, I was sad when it ended. But I was also completely and wholly satisfied, and that is a win.

Bottom Line: Full of likable yet flawed characters, tons of growth, and a lot of heart, You Spin Me Right Round is a can't-miss.

Most of the time, even though I’m in my early 40’s (as of this review), I thoroughly enjoy YA novels. I had kids young and I have an easy time identifying with and empathizing with teenagers and young adults. But this book just wasn’t one I could connect with on most levels.

That’s not to say it was a poorly-written novel or that there isn’t an audience out there for it. For one, it’s a great deal of fun. Who can resist a time slip novel full of pop culture references from the present day and from the 1980s? Think of the fashion, the music, the movies, the slang, and all the social mores that have changed from then to now? Add in the setting of a Christian boarding school and an openly gay main character of color who’s at the top of the food chain in the present day but in for a rude awakening when thrown back to the 1980s… and you have chaos in a book.

But… There’s always a “but” when it comes to media centered around time travel, isn’t there? It’s not that it’s been there and done that. It’s more of a feeling that the obvious pitfalls and plot holes are so much easier to spot as time has gone and movie after movie and book after book using the same plot device has been dissected and broken down to where it has sucked some of the joy and wonder out of the time travel trope. This book doesn’t zone in on the time travel element too much, but it’s always there in the background and it kind of sucks the joy out of things just a little as you read. It shuts down certain opportunities and opens up others but it feels like neither road is fully explored.

There is a large cast of characters; and while that’s not unusual for a book set in high school, it does somewhat cause each character to be shortchanged in development. And our main character, Luis, is not a character I ever came to fully like or identify with. And since the whole purpose of a protagonist is for us readers to identify with their struggle, that definitely impacted my enjoyment and interpretation of the book.

I do think that young YA readers will really enjoy this book more than I did. I do think it has an audience out there waiting for it. It just isn’t me.

4.5 stars!

“I know I’m being dramatic, but that’s kind of my brand.” I love Luis

Having never seen back to the future or really any other time travel movies or books, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

But woah this book had it all. Heartwarming friendship and love connections, abusive relationships and hate crimes, a force for change and an emphasis on how we can all have an impact on the future.

This book is great at blending the fun and serious moments. I love the main character and found all the characters to be well written. Luis trying to fit into the past is so funny, and he is so full of heart. It's a joy to watch him making friends and adjusting to school in the past. His friends both past and future are interesting and I only wish we gotten to see a little more of his modern friends. Having the setting be the same school in current and past time lines was really cool, it's interesting to see the younger versions of people Luis knows and see how the campus and town have changed. The plot is great and well paced with a fantastic ending.

Spin Me Right Round is a nearly perfect achillean, young adult coming-of-age story. Luis wants to go to prom with his boyfriend at his incredibly religious school. He is making demands seeking our faculty when he hits his head and wakes up in 1985- his mother’s senior year. Luis realizes that he’s there to stop his mom’s closeted friend, Chaz, from dying on prom night.

Luis took me a very long time to warm up to. At the start of the book he is obstinate and more than a little obtuse. By the end of the book, I completely warmed up to him. The ‘80s was a fun setting and the cast of characters was original with nods to Brat Pack archetypes. I sincerely hope many people read this book and see that it takes one person, one ally, to make monumental changes.

This was a mess, to say the least. I had a lot of issues with it, particularly with the writing, which I found very immature and inauthentic. I also really struggled with the main character, who is extremely selfish and while he finally turned around on that, it took an awful lot to get there, and I don't think his selfishness was unpacked appropriately.

That said, I found the time travel explanation at the end honestly sufficient in the way of explaining how much of the present was impacted by his decisions in the past. Usually I struggle with time travel books, but shockingly, that was the part I struggled with the least here.

The other thing I really liked was the side relationship between Chaz and Ernie. I saw it coming from a mile away, but it was still really rewarding and I appreciated that there was no actual cheating on behalf of Luis!

Lots of POC and queer rep in here, too, which was nice to see! But I think Luis played oppression olympics a lot and liked to think he had it the hardest, so I wish there were a few more reality checks regarding that.

Lastly, I have a slight problem with the handling of the hate crime incident. While I like that it resolved itself less violently than foretold, I think there's something off about the messaging here. Is the takeaway supposed to be that you must experience a hate crime to realize that other people have it harder/had it harder? Like I kind of got what it was saying, but it felt a little rough at the same time, and I think some fine tuning with the language surrounding it was necessary, and a bit of a deeper discussion into the ramifications.

Anyway, overall, not horrible, but I wouldn't really say I enjoyed this one. It leans a little dark on the homophobia, especially amongst conservative Christians, and I think it could be more harmful than happy for some people (not to say that it's the fault of the author! I just think people may read the synopsis and think it's a cute queer YA romance, and it's not even really a romance!)

TW: hate crime, mention of suicide/suicidal ideation (not acted on), homophobia, homophobic slurs, mentions of racism, violence

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book was delightful! Right from the start I was in love with Luis' voice. He was so funny and smart sweet, Sure in trying too hard to fix the injustices HE saw, he sometimes ran over the feelings of his friends a little bit.... but that's nothing a quick trip into the past can't fix, right?

Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for the e-ARC of this book to review. The time traveling premise is what immediately caught my interest, and it's what drew me in and kept me reading through parts I may have otherwise skipped. After all, those details are super important and intriguing: how the time travel initiated, what would change the course of history forever, could anything be prevented or must everything happen as it originally did, and would our main character Luis get home/be forever trapped in the past?

It took me until about 40% through to really get invested in the characters and want to know how they would all end up. The beginning portion has a lot of adjusting to some pretty awful people and events that everyone just keeps justifying, like terrible homophobia and oppressive school rules, and it felt tedious not knowing if there was any improvement in sight. It's obviously written in an important contrast to the "today" we all know, for sure - but we know it doesn't vanish overnight. For example, Luis is able to meet his parents in their high school days, which could be SO compelling, but his dad is truly awful - and Luis knows he stays awful in his modern experience (and even picks up a few new ways to be so) that it's just like, where is the redemption arc? Or if there's not one, will someone else get a new way of looking at the world?

Something that kept my reading from being smooth and effortless was a lot of the "2020s teen slang" in conversation. It goes a little overboard to the point it feels like a caricature of what a modern teen would sound like than any realistic depiction. As I read on, I tried to justify that it was intentionally over-the-top to contrast with the 1980s setting - Luis *had* to sound like he was out-of-this-world to his peers, so my interpretation is that he needs to sound kind of like this to readers too.