Review: CALL IT WHAT YOU WANT by Brigid Kemmerer

 

Call It What You Want by Brigid Kemmerer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


When his dad is caught embezzling funds from half the town, Rob goes from popular lacrosse player to social pariah. Even worse, his father’s failed suicide attempt leaves Rob and his mother responsible for his care.

Everyone thinks of Maegan as a typical overachiever, but she has a secret of her own after the pressure got to her last year. And when her sister comes home from college pregnant, keeping it from her parents might be more than she can handle.

When Rob and Maegan are paired together for a calculus project, they’re both reluctant to let anyone through the walls they’ve built. But when Maegan learns of Rob’s plan to fix the damage caused by his father, it could ruin more than their fragile new friendship...

This captivating, heartfelt novel asks the question: Is it okay to do something wrong for the right reasons? 

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I have to admit it: this is, for sure, one of my top reads of 2021.

My friends have been trying to get me to read Brigid Kemmerer's dystopian fantasy trilogy for ages, and I don't know why I haven't read that (still), but I ended up buying this book at Waterstones and didn't realise for a while it was the same author.

And, the moment I started this book, I was hooked.

The writing is amazing. Beautiful. It really is.

But more than that: the characters are just so real. Maegan and Rob are both so fully fleshed and fully realised--they're both so believable, and I felt like I knew them, perhaps more than I have in reading any other YA romance.

But then this didn't really feel like a romance--and I suppose it's more of a contemporary story, first and foremost. Although we can see the two central characters are falling in love (and this is just so satisfying and had me rooting for them), we get to know them as people first, and, crucially, we get to see them hurting.

Both characters are somewhat loners at the start. Maegan's avoided by most of her year group, having cheated on a test previously that meant the whole year had to retake. She's not liked, despite her being a very likeable and relatable character. Maegan's also got a secret: her older sister is pregnant by a married man. And her family don't want anyone knowing of the sister's pregnancy.

Rob is a troubled teenage boy whose dad stole a lot of money from almost everyone he knows. Rob, despite not being involved in the fraud, has been dropped from the popular group at school and is still paying for his father's actions, the following year. It's also quite heartbreaking as Rob's father tried to kill himself when the fraud was discovered and is now somewhat 'brain dead' due to this and we see Rob as a teenage carer too.

We see Rob and Maegan as they go through an array of emotions--loss and hurt and self-hatred--and we see how they come together and help each other. We see them falling in love. And we also see other themes explored through the secondary characters. The pressures on male mental health and toxic masculinity are also well examined in this book, particularly via Rob's former best mate, and that's done in a really deep and engaging way. This book really is eye-opening. It teaches you a lot without being preachy. It shows that you never know what others are going through.

But it's also exciting--there are twists and turns that really shake things up as secrets are revealed. And there's a pretty big reveal about the fraud case that Rob's parents were involved in. That had me speechless.

I can't urge you all enough to read it--because I feel everyone should.




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