You Know Me Well by Nina LaCour and David Levithan is a beautifully written story of friendship, self-discovery, and the thrill of finding someone who truly gets you. Mark and Kate, two near-strangers, connect during Pride Week, helping each other navigate love and life. Uplifting and heartfelt, it’s perfect for fans of contemporary YA.

Thank you NetGalley and st martins press for an advanced copy of this book.
David levithan writes books about how a single day/night changes the relationships they have with themselves and each other. This book he teams up with Nina lacour to tell this story of high school students tgat despite sitting next to each other never know each other until they meet up at pride events. They both are dealing with feelings for someone and trying to figure out how to move it forward. The dual pov helps move the story forward and kept the pacing right. It was a great queer romance to read.

Thanks so much to the publisher and to NetGalley for giving me access to this book. I liked this book but I didn't love it. I found the premise very interesting but I felt the follow through was weak. I would recommend it to anyone interested in a quick and easy books.

I received this free eARC novel from NetGalley. This is my honest review.

This has been on my TBR pile for so long, and I'm glad I finally got around to it. I really enjoyed the storyline and seeing the characters change throughout the story was a great character development. The plot was great and kept my attention. I'm glad I got the chance to read this and will be on the lookout for more in the future!

Two YA heavyweights – Nina LaCour (The Disenchantments, 2012) and David Levithan (Every Day, 2012) – have co-written this glossy and highly romanticized gay teen love story that is, sadly, just not quite as good as I’d hoped for from these major talents.

Mark just can’t get out of the friend zone with Ryan, and Kate is in love with a girl she has never met. Over the course of San Francisco’s Pride week, these two high schoolers from the East Bay work out their relationship problems, though not necessarily as they might have planned, and come to appreciate their new “rainbow alliance” with each other.

Mark and Kate alternate narration, and though I’m assuming each author wrote as one of the characters, to be honest, I find their voices a bit interchangeable. As they make their way through the week they get to know both themselves and each other, and can start seeing the shape of the future.

The main characters are attractive, though a little too precious, and it is noteworthy that nearly all their friends are gay and lesbian, though pretty much everyone is white and middle class. As you would expect, parents and other adults are in the background, and all are tolerant and supportive.

Art, and the creation and inspiration/source for it, is a key theme. Kate paints and there are some descriptions of her work, as well as a whole (unlikely) plot thread about her having an exhibition at a small San Francisco gallery. There is also a pivotal young queer poetry slam, with several of the poems written out in full – I have to say this does not work for me as well as it might do as spoken word.

I’m not the audience for this book; as Kate says “We grow up and we lose ourselves.” I’m no longer a teenager, and I find some of this yearning and feeling a bit eyerollingly silly, even as Kate predicts I will. Though I have enjoyed individual novels by the two authors much more and this feels like a bit of a tossed off effort, I think fans of smart YA romances will enjoy it.

Thanks to St Martin’s Griffin and Edelweiss for the eARC.

I typical love Nina LaCour books, but this one just didn't work for me. I only got 20ish% in and I found myself not interested in it at all. I gave it some time and I still didn't reach for it so I have to call it. It's me, not you, book. I wish we connected but it is time to say good bye and move on.

I am always happy to find a book about Pride, members of the Alphabet Mafia, and inclusion. This book was well written and had clearly defined characters. My on my complaint is that the monologues were not reasonably realistic to be believable that the characters were teenagers.

I am always hesitant when it comes to books co-authored by two people, but when I read this years ago, I truly enjoyed the way this book read out.

I normally love anything Levithan writes. YOU KNOW ME WELL, however, I couldn't get into. I felt lost and confused but I kept reading. My hope was that it'll hook me soon. Sadly, it didn't. It's a DNF (did not finish) for me.

"You Know Me Well" is one of the many books I read by David Levithan and one of the few books from Nina LaCour. Both authors write characters that are a part of the LGBQ+ community. As being a straight female I don't know the community all that well besides what I read and see. I feel like the community would be very happy though with how "You Know Me Well" was written.

Mark and Kate are such normal and relatable characters. I love how after one night they realize how much that they have in common and become best friends. The authors did a great job creating an entertaining book where the reader can't wait to see how the book ends. I really enjoyed "You Know Me Well" and I can't wait to read more from both of these authors.

This was very powerful. I hurt so, so much for Mark and Kate. Their pain was easy to feel and Ryan was so stupid, in my opinion. Though it all turned out fine in the end. This book meant a lot to me and I'm glad I read it. I highly recommend it.

Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this title. Unfortunately, I have lost interest in the title, partly due to trusted reviews, and will not be reviewing the title. I have, however, promoed the title through my weekly recap with links to Amazon. Thank you again, and I apologize for the inconvenience this may cause.

The central conceit of this novel is a bit of a stretch. These teens are instant best friends. They know everything about each other in an instant. Sure. And if stayed just that I would never mention this book to anyone. But it does some interesting things. How well do we know those close to us? How much can we truly know someone. And then there's this whole struggle between what people think is good for you and what you know is good for you. We have some standard tropes but they're given a little extra meat.

Cute book set during Pride Week. I enjoyed the characters!

Review on my old blog: http://botanical-studies.tumblr.com/post/145402978614/title-you-know-me-well-author-david-levithan-and

thanks to netgalley for the free copy.

Lena and Kate's relationship reminded me a lot of mine and my best friend's.

"when you're friends with someone for such a long time, it's easy to feel like she belongs to you, like the version of the person you became friends with is the only real version."

codependency. super unhealthy. and implodes.

lines I loved:
"[name redacted] is a date, and you are my calendar."
"there will be babies who will only know a country where everyone can marry."

awww. I may have cried at the second one. that's crazy to contemplate. crazy wonderful.

so I enjoyed the friendship storylines. I disapproved of the blatant disregard for bay area distances (I'm from those suburbs). and the fact that one half of the main characters DOES NOT HAVE AN ENDING.

but it was mostly enjoyable.

I thought this book was well-written and the plot moved along at a brisk pace, but honestly, even considering the fact that I am not a YA reading this, I found it unrealistic. There is endless talking and pining for love in this story (I found all the over-analyzing more like college students than high school, but maybe that’s just me) and yay, it’s a story of so many under-represented gay teens, but aside from that, not a whole lot happens. Well, actually, a lot happens in the span of just a few days, but I didn’t find it very believable. Having said that, I will admit that I loved the banter between the friends — I found it smart and funny and the authors established a nice rapport among them; but it was all smart and funny, barely an awkward pause despite the fact that most of them had only just met. I mean I get the whole fast friends thing, but there was a lot of that here – not just one relationship.

LaCour and Levithan had their hearts in the right place, but I thought the story that unfolded had the potential to be so much more.



For Goodreads:

Why I picked it — I was interested in reading a book by David Levithan, since I hadn’t yet – and he’s a Jersey boy! I’m also interested in We are Okay, Nina LaCour’s new book.
Reminded me of… other stories with alternating narrators – also, Let The Great World Spin, because of the framework of the story evolving around a sequence of events over a couple of days.
For my full review — click here

This is my first book from either of these authors, and it was completely enjoyable! I loved how they teamed up to write this book - it added dual personality!

You Know Me Well was really just an okay read for me. In a way, I found it original, but I also found it pretty unoriginal at the same time, if that makes sense. I mean, I've never read a book like this, but I'm aware of similar books. I just didn't find the idea behind the story unique. I also felt that You Know Me Well should be a really quick read, but it just seemed so slow to me. It probably didn't help that I took about a week to read this book.

You Know Me Well is set in San Francisco, however, I know next to nothing about San Francisco so it was a bit ambiguous. But, of course, that will probably be just me. I would say, though, that the characters could have been placed in any city with no effect on the story at all.

Kate and Mark are both likeable enough as main characters. But I just could not connect with either of them. They kind of annoyed me a bit too. They meet and become best friends in a day - that's almost as bad as insta-love! I also felt they were a bit too cardboard-cut-out-like. I just found very little substance to their characters.

You Know Me Well is told from the alternating first-person perspectives of Kate and Mark. I the authors wrote one of these perspectives each. However, there was no indication as to when the story would change point-of-view, so that irritated me a bit. Both perspectives read fairly similarly too for being different authors, which was actually really good.

For being a fairly short book (compared to other books I've read), it took me ages to finish You Know Me Well. This made the plot feel really slow and I just didn't feel I was getting anywhere. The story is also slightly on the predictable side. It was fairly obvious how it would end in some ways, especially with Mark. However, their story does wrap up nicely.

Well, when it came to my opinion of You Know Me Well I'm definitely in the minority. I just felt a lack of connection to the story and it dragged. Plenty of others rave about this book, though, so I'd say give it a go if you really want to otherwise give it a miss.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which is sure to be a hit with teens. I thought the characters were believable. I felt the authors really captured the desperate feeling of teen love. I think teens in my school will love this book.