Nathan playing hockey. Maggie playing keyboard. Maggie studying. Preschool. Nathan listening to music with eyes closed. Nathan and Maggie skating. Nathan kissing Maggie’s hair. Bunny hugging teddy bear. Nathan and Maggie hugging.
Comp titles: Lynn Painter’s Better Than The Movies; Ann Liang’s This Time It’s Real; Tashy Bhuiyan’s Counting Down With You; Laura Taylor Namey’s A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow; Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Maggie Wang lives by her tiger mom’s rules—even her crush ticks all the right boxes. But when she finally works up the courage to confess to the perfect guy, he’s too oblivious to look beyond their friendship. Desperate to turn his head, Maggie hatches a plan: snag a fake date to his hockey team’s skate party and make him jealous, as long as she can survive her clumsy self on the ice. Enter Nathan Myers—the team grump. Once he agrees to be her stand-in, everything seems simple enough: he’ll teach her how to skate, and she’ll put up with his attitude. Only the more time they spend together, the more Maggie discovers a gentle teddy bear hidden beneath Nathan’s gruff exterior. For the first time, she wonders if it’s okay to let go of certain expectations—being herself might actually be enough. But Nathan’s a wild card with no college plans. He doesn’t fit in the future Maggie’s mom has mapped out for her. Trapped between the family expectations and her growing feelings, she must decide whether breaking the rules is worth it with the boy who’s becoming more than just a fake date.
#tropes and elements
#YouDeservepIt
It’s Only Me, a YA contemporary romance:
Raised by her strict Tiger Mom, Maggie Wang fake-dates the hockey team grump to make her crush jealous, only to fall for the wrong guy and risk breaking all her mom’s rules.
#Q #YA #R #C #ComingOfAge #poc #writingcommunity #amquerying
