It took me a little while to warm up to Kat. I’m all for flirting – yay flirting! – but I do think that flirting with your best friend’s boyfriend is not the most awesome decision if you don’t want your best friend to fall out with you majorly, although I did think her resulting social banishment was a bit harsh.
Kat was also obsessed with her appearance. I got that she dressed and acted extra girly so that people wouldn’t think her two dads had done a bad job in raising her, but I’d rather have seen her stick two fingers up to the nay-sayers instead of bowing down to what they thought represented a feminine ideal. Putting people in boxes according to their gender is something that gives me the squint and I’m not going to start banging my drum for gender neutrality here, but I would have liked Kat more if she’d done the things she enjoyed doing despite what other people thought. By the end of the book, however, I did start to like her and I was glad she picked up with the hobbies she used to enjoy.
The romance in Any Other Girl was quite sweet and Emmett seemed nice but I wanted Kat to just tell Harper that she liked him too. I didn’t like that Harper called dibs on him. No one has the ‘right’ to anyone else’s feelings and if the situation was reversed and two guys decided between themselves which one of them was going to end up with the girl, I think we’d all be a bit outraged.
For me, Any Other Girl didn’t have the same bite as Faking Perfect did. It wasn’t a bad story by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn’t gritty or edgy like Phillips’ previous book.
Maybe I’m just a twisted cynic, but I like bad things to happen to characters. Like that little sociopath kid who puts two insects in a jar to see which one will eat the other first, I like to see how characters will react and (hopefully) grow under extreme pressure. The worst thing Kat had to deal with was fancying a boy that her cousin had a crush on and handling her cousin’s ire when she finds out that Kat started seeing the boy behind her back.
What I did like, however, was that this was a fun read. Rebecca Phillips’ writing just flows so nicely, it’s no effort to read and I found myself immersed in the story in no time. It was the literary equivalent of floating on your back in the swimming pool on a warm day: very pleasant and completely effortless.
All in all, this was a pleasant, fluffy summer romance story. Recommended as a book to take to the beach for fans of Jenny Han.
3 stars
I was given a copy of Any Other Girl in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to Kensington and Netgalley.