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A review by nclcaitlin
Wren Martin Ruins It All by Amanda DeWitt
3.25
If you want a book cure for Red, White, and Royal Blue, or books by Alice Oseman, I would recommend this!
Wren is president of the student council and he is determined to make an impact. Starting with ridding the school of the much-loved Valentine’s Day dance to allocate that money elsewhere. However, his fellow council members—especially the vice president and annoyingly perfect person Leo Reyes—suggest that they use Buddy, the popular anonymous not-dating app to sponsor it instead.
Whilst managing homework, council duties, and expectations, Wren secretly curiously downloads Buddy and makes a connection with the boy he starts chatting with.
This was so cute! Wren is such a sassy, chaotic main character. He can also be an obnoxious teen sometimes, but he’s also very relatable and sympathetic.
This also presents Wren struggling with expressing his asexuality, as well as his grief over losing his mother a couple years previous. His experience is portrayed with empathy and opens up discussions on how we should approach exposing Young Adult audiences to important topics in a way that is open and not treated negatively.
Yes, it was obvious who the Buddy Wren chats with is, so all the drama and mystery initially felt overdone. This predictably did make me roll my eyes and mutter, get on with it, but I had to remind myself, this is a type of romance type of book where ‘I hated this guy forever, but maybe that’s because I actually had feelings for him’ is expected.
I think I would have wanted more emotional exploration of Wren’s asexuality. There isn’t many conversations between him and his family, friends, etc. which could have provided a good framework to deal with how we navigate such experiences.
Wren is president of the student council and he is determined to make an impact. Starting with ridding the school of the much-loved Valentine’s Day dance to allocate that money elsewhere. However, his fellow council members—especially the vice president and annoyingly perfect person Leo Reyes—suggest that they use Buddy, the popular anonymous not-dating app to sponsor it instead.
Whilst managing homework, council duties, and expectations, Wren secretly curiously downloads Buddy and makes a connection with the boy he starts chatting with.
This was so cute! Wren is such a sassy, chaotic main character. He can also be an obnoxious teen sometimes, but he’s also very relatable and sympathetic.
This also presents Wren struggling with expressing his asexuality, as well as his grief over losing his mother a couple years previous. His experience is portrayed with empathy and opens up discussions on how we should approach exposing Young Adult audiences to important topics in a way that is open and not treated negatively.
Yes, it was obvious who the Buddy Wren chats with is, so all the drama and mystery initially felt overdone. This predictably did make me roll my eyes and mutter, get on with it, but I had to remind myself, this is a type of romance type of book where ‘I hated this guy forever, but maybe that’s because I actually had feelings for him’ is expected.
I think I would have wanted more emotional exploration of Wren’s asexuality. There isn’t many conversations between him and his family, friends, etc. which could have provided a good framework to deal with how we navigate such experiences.