Hanna/Laila being canon is the best thing in my life and the only thing keeping me alive for the next year. Oh my god, I spent the first 45% of the book thinking I was imagining it, maybe, but totally shipping them anyway. And can I just scream for a minute because their romance is SO SUBTLE AND SO PERFECT.

This book is also about Laila falling in love with - it’s kind of a spoiler but I DON’T CARE I HAVE TO SCREAM - her best friend, Hannah, who is a Korean lesbian. Redgate knows exactly where to place her quotes and exactly how to compose the narrative so that every aspect of Laila’s life feels like an authentic part of a big picture and more importantly, a fundamental part of her character arc. You know, I think integrating so many different discussions into the narrative could have made for a slightly all-over-the-place book, but it does not at all. Like that one chapter where Laila talks about how she was taught to be ashamed of sex and romance to the point where her pansexuality felt shameful, and it’s not even about her being queer, but about her being ashamed to feel at all - I felt that. Redgate will just make one passage at the end of a chapter focus on a specific part of Laila’s experience in the world, and suddenly you feel as if your life has been changed forever. I have never felt a character on the same level that I felt this character. The way Riley Redgate writes Laila is so… empathetic. And if you relate to any single one of these things, or probably even if you've been a teenager before, you will get her. And listen, the way the narrative talks about Laila’s experience of being pansexual, of being biracial, of being Ecuadorian, of being plus size, of having anxiety: it’s all there and it’s all amazing. Like, okay Final Draft stars a pansexual biracial Ecuadorian plus-size lead with anxiety. That’s one level to it, but there are so many more. So for me - I am also beginning to deal with the college application process - there’s that sense of how personal this book is for me. At its heart, I think this book is a perfect conveyment of what it is really like to be a teenage girl growing up in our current society and what it is like to struggle with yourself, to struggle with your friends right before you go to college. Okay, so now that I’ve stopped crying again, let’s get to why this book is so good. This is going on my preemptive top ten of the year and no one can stop me.

It has been a full month since I read this book and I am still so shook by it and so invested and, oh my god. This is one of those rare books that is an organic piece of life itself. 🍀 Guess what the Dragons and Tea book club is reading for June 2019!

Final draft riley redgate