You Know Me Well is a book about two people who sit next to each other in maths for a year without really getting to know each other until a crazy night out in San Francisco.
The plot moves really quickly and manages to cram an awful lot into what is only a medium-sized book. Which is good, because the book was never boring. However, the friendship between Mark and Kate felt rushed. Like they'd only known each other a day and they were already BFFs.
I found their alternate viewpoints both good and bad. Good because both the MCs were interesting people, but bad because in an already packed plot it just made things even more fast-paced and I didn't feel like I got to know Mark and Kate as much as I wanted to.
I liked that this wasn't a coming-out book (not for the MCs anyway), but was more about already being out and trying to find who you are and where you fit into the world. And I liked the depiction of San Francisco Pride. It sounded like a hoot and a half.
This actually had a lot in common with Nina Lacour's other book, Everything Leads To You, in that inboth books the MC is an amazingly talented teenager. Like, seriously talented. In Everything Leads To You, the MC is barely eighteen but she has already been employed by a film studio to be a set designer. A set designer. For a film studio. In You Know Me Well, the MC is an amazingly talented artist, whose pictures raise thousands of dollars for charity when they are sold. It's just ... It makes the MCs seem older than they're supposed to be. Like they're thirty-something. When I was eighteen, I could barely find my arse with both hands. There's no effin' way I'd have had the talent or chutzpah to achieve the things Lacour's MCs do. No effin' way. And while this makes the MCs interesting, it doesn't make them real or relatable for the 99.9% of teenagers who don't achieve such greatness.
Not sure who I'd recommend this to because it didn't grab me as much as I'd hoped but it was still an okay read.
3 stars