Frankly in Love

If you're looking for a YA romance with characters from diverse backgrounds, skip E&P and read this. FRANKLY IN LOVE, at its core, is a YA rom com involving a fake relationship and a love triangle. There are nerdy AP students (“Apeys”) who still curse like sailors and can be both geeky and cool. It delves into interracial relationships, falling in and out of love, anti-Black racism within the Korean American community, and mortality. At various points, Frank contemplates the stories we tell to our parents, and how those differ from what we tell our friends and what we tell ourselves. This book covers a lot of ground for what at first looks like your average YA. 
 
I've heard some mixed reviews on this book, that the romance elements move too fast to be “realistic.” I'd actually say the opposite. When you're in high school, you can go from crushing on someone to dating them to hating them in a span of three weeks. So the fast speed of teen romance didn't bother me and actually lent itself to what I thought was a realistic plot.