Romcom about high school friends making a romcom movie for a film festival that they all hope will enhance their college application.
Director Emma, who has not yet come out to her parents, clashes with Sophie, openly out and recently returned from a year in France after her parents’ divorce. Supporting characters are in various stages of romance.
The slow development of a relationship between the two young women, as they initially compete and then combine their two films, is believable, the interactions of the students realistic, and the progress of the final film interesting.

Cute bisexual girl and lesbian fall in love story? Sign me up. I have to say...all of their heterosexual friends kind of blended together for me, and there was way more of them in the story than I thought was needed. So many side stories. Also, I admit that I found both main characters to be annoying at times, but I do appreciate the opposites attract idea they went with. Overall, a fine, fun story where no wlw characters die or have awful endings, but it could have had more.

This book was...not what I was hoping.

The story follows high school students Emma and Sophia as they play matchmaker with their friends while each attempting to produce a short film for a competition. Despite their opposing views on love, they begin to realize that maybe the hate they felt for one another was just hiding the true feelings underneath.

There were a lot of things that irked me about this book. Characters threw around the word "love" with a level of casualness that real teenagers would never use. People who have literally just gone on their first date are not in love and no high school student would say that they are. Desombre used the phrase "my stomach bottomed out" enough times that it began to get on my nerves, and every character felt cartoonishly flat. Kate is sunshiny and nice, Matt is evil, Sophia hates love and is generally pessimistic, Emma is a hopeless romantic, Myrah is obsessed with Peter. The entire story just felt... underdeveloped.

That being said, I did enjoy a few parts of it - the process of making the movies reminded me a lot of film class in high school (especially how crappy the film ended up being) and many of the cute date scenes succeeded in being cute. But these things do not balance out the others.

There are so many other cute romcoms out there (and f/f ones to boot: I'd recommend The Falling in Love Montage or You Should See Me in a Crown for similarish books with way more depth of character and plot)

What a fun, diverse retelling—I'm a sucker for a new spin on Shakespeare, and this rivals-to-lovers romance did not disappoint!

As soon as I heard that this book had f/f rivals to lovers, I knew I wanted to read it. Who would’t? I Think I Love You was an heartwarming read that’ll leave you smiling.

Emma is a movie director in the making, and she wants to enter a film competition that would provide her with an amazing scholarship. The movie she has in mind is a f/f rom-com because, as a bisexual girl, she never gets to see herself represented in movies other than as stereotypes. Meanwhile, Sophia, her nemesis, is back in town after living in Paris for the past year. She joins Emma and their friends on the crew although they disagree on everything.

I really liked Emma’s reasons for directing a gay rom-com. Although she is bisexual, it means a lot to her that people recognize that while she could “end up” with a guy, she could still date girls, especially because she hasn’t come out to her parents.

Also, I enjoyed Emma and Sophia’s dynamic! Rivals-to-lovers is always so fun; I liked the tension between them. It’s also an opposites-attract situation: Emma is desperate for love while Sophia doesn’t believe in love. Their romance was so cute, and I wish we had gotten more of them.

Honestly though, this book focuses a lot on their friends Tom and Kate’s romance, considering they’re side characters. Most of the drama is actually drama from them, as opposed to drama directly involving the protagonists, so I thought this was a little weird. I just think some aspects of the plot wasn’t balanced as well as it could have been.

Overall, I Think I Love You was a quick, adorable read. The characters were great and I really enjoyed the romance. I recommend this book if you’re looking for a cute contemporary and/or f/f rivals-to-lovers!

This is everything I needed in a f/f rom-com! It had the enemies to lovers (which I'm a sucker for). It had me laughing, crying, fangirling. It was just beautiful!

I read this within one sitting. I loved the writing style so much. It was so captivating that I couldn't put it down! The characters were so well developed that it made me fall in love with them. I loved Emma and Sophia's relationship sooooo much. I thought they were the absolute cutest. The hand holding kept making me squeal!

I also loved the story line. It was so cute how they were making movies! I haven't read anything like that before, so it was super fun to read! Have you ever wished you could make a movie? After reading this, it has now been added to my bucket-list.

If you're ever in the mood for a f/f book or just a rom-com in general, then I would highly recommend this book!

[note: this review is set to be published on my blog on 2/16/21]
Disclaimer

I received a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley. All my opinions are my own.

Background

Coming out March 2nd, 2020, I Think I Love You by Auriane Desombre is a YA rom-com published by Underlined, an imprint of Penguin Random House. It is the author’s debut novel though she has been featured in an anthology.

Synopsis

From the publisher’s website, “A YA contemporary rom com about two girls who start as rivals but after a twist of events, end up falling for one another--at least they think so. A pitch perfect queer romance--and it's a paperback original!

Arch-nemeses Emma, a die-hard romantic, and more-practical minded Sophia find themselves competing against one another for a coveted first-prize trip to a film festival in Los Angeles . . . what happens if their rivalry turns into a romance? For fans of Becky Albertalli's Leah on the Offbeat, full of laugh-out-loud humor and make-your-heart-melt moments.” (link)

Relationships

A big issue I had with this book was the main romantic relationship. This is a rivals to lovers romance, a trope I tend to adore. However there are some very pivotal ways that it, or any other flavor of hate to love in a contemporary, can go wrong. One of those ways is when one of the characters treats the other so much worse than the character treats them. I don’t mean being mean or rude, I mean treating their love interest legitimately terribly while the love interest is just a bit rude. This is what happened here.

Emma, one of the love interests, constantly went straight to personal attacks when talking to Sophia. Sophia once critiqued the idea that Emma had for the movie and instead of rebuking her argument or really just saying any valid critique of Sophia’s own lack of ideas, Emma jumps straight to childish ad hominem attacks about how Sophia is anti-love and that makes her a terrible person. Later in the same scene Emma calls Sophia unprovoked. Their level of animosity towards each other just didn’t really compare and it didn’t work for me.

I am not saying Sophia is entirely innocent here because she does say some bitter and unnecessary comments about love to a girl she knows is obsessed with it but her comments never read to be as needlessly cruel like Emma’s do.

Another issue I had was the very basis of the relationship. Their friends lied to them and convinced Emma that Sophia was in love with her and Sophia that Emma was in love with her. Which. Just. What the fuck? That is so messed up and kept me from ever actually rooting from the relationship and made me absolutely despise the friends.

Now a typical plot point in books like this is that the characters were actually always in love with each other. For a while I thought that the book was going to subvert that expectation because there were no hints that they liked each other and there was no romantic tension between them at the start. But no. Apparently there were always supposed to be in love and that just didn’t come across whatsoever.

Characters

For me a large part of the appeal is that hate to love for me is to see the characters grow and change. However there is very little actual character development in the book.

Emma remains stagnant, her toxic qualities are ignored. She does not become less self-centered, she doesn’t ever begin to see Sophia’s point of view, and the person she was at the start of the novel is not very different from who she is in the end. There’s never a moment where she stops and reflects about how poorly she treated Sophia even once they are finally friendly.

There were also points where she was very very obviously wrong but the narrative treats her as if she didn’t do anything wrong and it just… left me very frustrated.
I wouldn’t even say she has a more realistic view of love because she doesn't, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, especially for a rom-com, but nothing else about her changes either.

Sophia is the more nuanced character here. We get a better look into her personal life than we do Emma’s and it’s generally more interesting. She also has character growth. At the start she is very much anti-love due to her parents divorce and her mom moving away to Paris but she learns to accept love and understand it.
And she isn’t perfect by any means. She is petty and insecure but growth happens there and her flaws just grated on me less than Emma’s did. Which I am almost surely biased here because I did relate more to Sophia than I did Emma.

Plot

The plot was a mess. It wasn’t strictly a very messy plot but it didn’t work for a romance book, not one bit. Two much time was focused away from the main couple for it to ever really feel like a romance book.

A subplot about a heterosexual couple took up a lot of the page time. Maybe this came from Much Ado About Nothing but I wouldn’t know and, frankly, it should have been dropped even if it was. We get so much time spent on getting these two heterosexual characters together, and on the drama between them to the point where the low point of the book is reliant on them. And I simply did not care about them.

It also took so much time away from the main couple. The narrative never lingers on them, never really gives us more than one or two scenes of them together, because of all the time that has to be dedicated to the heterosexual couple. I love to see the antagonistic flirting, the cute fluffiness, and everything else about the relationship and its development. But here we only got the tiniest morsel of a taste of that.

Representation

This book is important. It has important representation. It’s a book about two sapphic girls and they have a happy ending. It’s a book that has a bi character that avoids a lot of the major stereotypes about bi people. And it has some incredibly meaningful conversations about the importance of representation that I loved. And I am so very sad that I didn’t love this book more.

Conclusion

While more things about this book annoyed me, I am going to end here because my criticisms get increasingly more nitpicky and less meaningful.

I think a lot of people are going to love this book. I think it’s a very, very important book. But it simply wasn’t for me. Maybe it’s time for me to say goodbye to YA contemporaries like this.

“For all our faults, we’re pretty good matchmakers.”

Emma’s dream is to attend film school, and entering the summer NYC-LA Film Festival for high school students with her friends is how she plans on getting her foot in the industry’s door. She dreams of filming the gay rom-com of her heart because she’s never seen herself represented in the movies she loves to watch. Emma’s plans go awry when Sophia, Emma’s rival and the only other out queer girl at their school, returns from a year in Paris. Filled with meddling friends and lots of scheming, I Think I Love You is a sapphic retelling of Much Ado About Nothing set in modern-day New York City.

While there’s plenty of angst to go around between Emma and Sophia’s film rivalry and their opposing views about love, moments of sweet romance and flirty banter are in the majority. There’s room for further development of certain themes, such as Emma’s fear of coming out as bisexual to her parents and Sophia’s issues with her mother, but all of the subplot threads are neatly tied up by the end of the story. The characters feel authentically adolescent, and the atmosphere of the city shines through the setting. Overall, Auriane Desombre’s debut novel is a fun and lightweight sapphic romantic comedy.

PRR Writer, Caroline Ross

Quarantine may still be happening in our day-to-day lives, but books like I Think I Love You gives us the opportunity to live a life that isn't our own. I Think I Love You is pure escapism at its finest and will definitely give readers something to talk, and swoon, about this summer. If you are looking for something with quirks and humor and a glimmer of a good romance then look no further than Auriane Desombre's phenomenal novel.

With the publishing world finally catching onto the need for diversity, I've spent the better part of the last decade anticipating more releases like this one. I Think I Love You is a book that marks a great beginning and hopefully signals more and more books that feature the varied types of romances necessary in our modern times. We've still got a long ways to go, but I'm so thankful for the growth we've seen the last few years.

I Think I Love You is the type of indulgent, swoon-worthy, yet heartfelt and humorous, read that I flew through in one sitting. Cute and lively in its fast-pace, Desombre has a way with her writing that sparks interest almost instantly. It is breezy, thoughtful, and undeniably charismatic.

There was something about I Think I Love You that compelled me from the very first few pages and didn't want to put it down until I'd finished. Desombre pulls all the right moves when it comes to this slow-burning romance and I think, for me, this is what kept me glued to my seat and all but turned the pages on its own. Slow-burn romances are great because of the potential of tension and banter--for me, it makes the development and story all the more addictive.

Packed with engaging characters, Indie L.A. locations and a growing romantic entanglement that only gets more and more indulgent with time, I Think I Love You is truly a fun read.

This was a rivals-to-lovers YA novel that had a playful edge. The dialogue was believable. Sophia and Emma are determined not to like each other. Despite the fact that they both trying to win top prize in a film competition, they start falling deeper for the other person. I will say that the confessions were more of the ones you find in the classic teenage love films, which is what the author was going for. I'd rate this a 4/5.

I was a couple of chapters into this before I began to suspect that it was a retelling of Much Ado About Nothing and a few more before I was certain. Even before that, the general direction of the plot is pretty obvious, given that it's a romance. We expect a pair in conflict to be covering for mutual attraction, complicated by misunderstandings and assumptions. The plot follows the events of the play fairly well but doesn't do much when it comes to assigning motivations. We get only the vaguest explanations for why people act in destructive ways. Stronger motivations would do a lot to make this a more compelling read.

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange of an honest review.

Emma is a die-hard romantic. She believes in love, big gestures and she loves rom-coms, even the bad ones. When the opportunity of making a short film and win a trip to a film festival in Los Angeles occurs she decides to do a perfect bi rom-com with her friends Myrah, Matt and Tom and her cousin Kate. Her plans are "ruined" when Sophia, Tom's best friend, comes back from Paris, becoming again part of their group, with her more practical mind and no desire of love or matchmaking. Finding themselves as rivals for the competition, Emma and Sophia are ready to do anything to prove the other wrong and make the perfect film. But when their rivalry starts to become something more, everything is even more complicated.

I think I love you is told by two POVs, Emma's and Sophia's, two girls very different from one other.
Emma is the romentic one, she loves matchmaking, she loves love, she loves seeing people happy, like her cousin Kate and her obvious and reciprocated crush for Tom, or Myrah's crush for her new colleague at work. She's stubborn and her not being out to her parents is something that burdens and scares her, fearing her coming out could ruin their relationship. The need to see herself as bi represented in a movie is the motivation that brings her to make a bi rom-com. When Sophia comes back and tries to suggest another direction and plot for the movie, they start to bicker and everything complicates further. Above all when they start to act more like "friends" and more than rivals.

Sophia is more practical, almost cynical in her view of love and couples and her character is complex. Her parents' divorce brought her to be and think this way, more disillusioned, and her experience in France with her girlfriend and friends, in Paris, where she went to stay with her mother and her new partner for a year, left her bitter and upset. Coming back and finding her group moved on even without her is another thing that left Sophia even more bitter and sad, feeling put aside and forgotten. Trying to insert herself again in her group means clashing with Emma and her ideas.

I think I love you is a book full of couple and matchmaking. Emma, Myrah and Matt "conspire" to bring Tom and Kate together, since they are too shy to confess their own feelings, Matt, Tom, Kate and Myrah mislead Emma and Sophia, hoping to stop their fights and bring the group together again.

I didn't like some things about this book and I found it a bit predictable, even though not in a negative way. I found Emma was a bit too self-centered and naive, contrary to Sophia, who was more mature and meditative. I found the book focusing a bit too much on the other "ships", above all on Kate and Tom, than on Emma and Sophia and their falling in love with one other. I'd loved to see their relationship more developed.

BUT
I like reading about the matchmaking and how the characters are so strongly connected to one other, how they are friends and love each other. I liked so much the relationships in this book, between Kate and Emma or Tom and Sophia.
I liked the setting and the whole making a movie idea, a stage, a way for Emma to come out to her parents. I liked how the author talked about Emma's struggles and fears about coming out and Sophia's issues with her parents' divorce and adapting to her new life.

Overall I think I love you is a cute and sweet story, about relationships, connections, jealousy, disillusion, talking about important themes like divorce, coming out, fighting for your own dreams and goals, being true to oneself.

3.5

This one was a little bit if a disappointment. It was just boring to me. I didn't hate it but I didn't love it. I finished it last month and have already forgotten the entire plot and couldn't tell you the MCs names.

This is such an adorable, quick read with just the right balance of tropes and nuance! An enjoyable read.

I received a complimentary copy of this title from the publisher through NetGalley. Opinions expressed are my own.

I am an adult who reads YA, so take this with a grain of salt. But oh my gosh, this book is SO high school. And sometimes that's not an issue if the characters, writing, etc. are compelling enough to get past the sheer drama of it all. But this was not the case.

Actual high-schoolers might enjoy this. As an adult, I personally did not.

In the sweetest debut I’ve read in a long time, Desombre gives people everywhere, but especially queer people (it’s almost pride okay) a cloud of cotton candy to pull apart. This book doesn’t only deal with first love, but tackles coming out and divorce too.

This book was such a delight to read. I genuinely enjoyed the characters and felt invested in the world they live in. Desombre writes living in NYC as regular 99%ers feel real and really pins the essence of the city that never sleeps.

The two male characters felt a little flat to me, but everyone else sparkled on the page. All in all, I desperately wish that I would have both had this book in high school, and felt more comfortable with who I was. Since there’s no point longing for the past, I’ll devour Desombre’s work over and over again and live vicariously through her characters, as all the best authors are able to help you achieve.

DNFed at 18%. The characters and plot were too immature for me. And I was over Sophia the moment it was her POV. I was excited and am always wanting to read more diverse books, but this was not it.

This book was amazing. I loved the bisexual and lesbian representation, and it was done so well without relying on stereotypes. I think the story was such a fun and easy read, and I truly read this in one sitting.

I finished this book so quickly! It was easy to dive into the plot and find the characters lives. I loved the bisexual and lesbian representation in this! I don't think there were any tropes or stereotypes throughout which really made me happy. The characters had a lot of valuable and big conversations, but there was never too much weight put on those conversations. There were a lot of minor plot twists that kept me intrigued but it never felt over the top. The whole plot was realistic and believable, which I think aided the book overall. The book was very balanced in the young adult genre, the characters were naïve in some aspects, as would be expected, but grew throughout and became more dynamic.

I just wish the ending had given a little more romance! But still a super cute, fun, and emotional read.

This book was so sweet and beautiful! I'm a sucker for a good enemies-to-lovers romance and this book did not disappoint. Tons of strong chemistry between the characters and a super satisfying ending. It made my heart so happy to read.