Honestly, for what it is, I think it's fantastic. But then, I can't really define what it actually is - besides YA lit.

I could not pinpoint a setting if I was paid. Sure, it's Paris... but in a time of stratified social classes wherein princes go to the same "high school" as merchant's daughters. Bizarre.

Beyond the complete inability to get my bearings, I enjoyed this blatant retelling of She's All That. It's fun, light-hearted, and easy-to-read. The bad guys are bad guys, even when they're telling the story, and the good guys are good guys who make silly, low-stakes mistakes that make them lovable in spite of themselves.

The book would be vastly improved if the author had made up a fictional city/country and kept everything else the same. As a Francophile, trying to square the book with any actual knowledge of French culture was painful.

Because the synthesized voice kept "swallowing" unstressed syllables, sometimes the story was hard to understand.

A basic YA romance.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced audio copy.

It was very boring and historical. It felt like every other historical romance I have read. I did not enjoy the fact that it read very ya.

Bellegarde is slightly predictable, but with enough twists at the end to make it interesting. This is a "happily ever after" story about a young woman who thinks her life is set by her parent's profession, but then finds that she has a lot more options than she thought she did. There are a lot of typical historical romance tropes: rags to riches, bad boy to good boy, snotty rich brats, evil step-mother (kinda), mean girls, distant parent becoming an involved parent, poor people who know that love and friendship are more important than anything else, etc. It's set in historical Paris around the time of Marie Antoinette, but the college students at the center of the story move in a world entirely similar to our own. While the final ending is obvious from the beginning, the journey that the two main characters go on was still enjoyable with just enough twists and turns to keep the story from becoming entirely cliched. Think Ever After + Legally Blonde + Bridgerton.

I cannot listen to the synthesized recording of this book. I think that it would be an interesting book to physically read it to listen to when the narrated version actually comes out. I’d love a copy of either of those! Giving it 3 stars for the benefit of the doubt, but I cannot get through it.

This was a fun, quick read. While the premise of the story is not particularly new, I really enjoyed the characters and the way the author told their stories/experiences through their own narratives. It was the perfect weekend escape novel.

Honestly, for what it is, I think it's fantastic. But then, I can't really define what it actually is - besides YA lit.

I could not pinpoint a setting if I was paid. Sure, it's Paris... but in a time of stratified social classes wherein princes go to the same "high school" as merchant's daughters. Bizarre.

Beyond the complete inability to get my bearings, I enjoyed this blatant retelling of She's All That. It's fun, light-hearted, and easy-to-read. The bad guys are bad guys, even when they're telling the story, and the good guys are good guys who make silly, low-stakes mistakes that make them lovable in spite of themselves.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Bellegarde is an interesting historical fiction that just abandons the inconvenient constraints of the times, such as time appropriate social norms, in favor of advancing the plot. While this seems to defeat the purpose of historical fiction, it is refreshing every now an again to read a story that posits the idea of how things could have been.

Evie is a working class girl who is bullied; Beau is an aristocrat who makes a bet with a half-brother to woo her, 10 Things I Hate About You style.

This was a fun, fast read with sweet characters and a happy ending.