Book review: Shipped by Meredith TateA cute (if slightly predictable) You’ve Got Mail-style ro
Book review: Shipped by Meredith TateA cute (if slightly predictable) You’ve Got Mail-style romance, featuring two IRL enemies who bond over their favourite TV show online.At school, Stella Greene and Wesley Clarke are rivals battling it out for the chance to become valedictorian. Online, they’re both huge fans of the short-lived cult classic Warship Seven. When a local convention is announced, the two plan to meet up, unaware of each others’ IRL identities.Stella and Wesley’s rivalry is told from both sides with the narrative switching between the two protagonists, occasionally interspersed with Warship Seven scenes which nicely parallel the protagonists’ lives. Warship Seven is, of course, a thinly veiled fictional Firefly, and as a huge Firefly fan myself, I enjoyed how Tate incorporated the sci-fi story and its fandom into the novel. I also liked how Tate used her fictional story-within-a-story to comment on the different sides of fandom, from ship wars to misogyny within sci-fi fandoms.There’s a lot to like about Shipped, although the main storyline is fairly predictable and none of the secondary characters especially stood out to me. Still, enemies-to-lovers is a classic trope for good reason and Wesley and Stella made for a cute couple. Overall, it’s an entertaining read, if not a particularly memorable one.Many thanks to Meredith Tate for providing a copy of Shipped. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers Rating: 3 stars | ★★★✰✰Review cross-posted to GoodreadsBuy on Amazon: US | UK -- source link
#shipped#booklr#book review#ya lit#genre romance#genre contemporary#3 stars