This was a pretty quick read for me. I liked all the characters. I liked Macy, but I found I liked a lot of the secondary characters more. Caleb was probably my favourite. I really liked the relationship that Macy had with her brother. I wasn’t a huge fan of her friend Jasmine.

I didn’t love the cheating story line, I didn't feel like it fit the characters personalities. Especially the lets just be together and get it out of our system and pretend it never happened, thing.

It touches on a lot of issues, (racism, LGBTQ, suicide) but just skims them. I wish it would have gone a little deeper into those issues and given us more insight to how the characters dealt with these things with a bit more substance.

While the characters are in high school, the writing made me feel like I was reading a middle grade book instead of YA. Overall it was a pretty cute read and I enjoyed the plot!

This book is absolutely BRILLIANT! It’s a sweet rom com that definitely take a deeper look at what it means to be in high school!

As Macy navigates her final year in high school she has a lot to sort through! What I loved about this book was that it didn’t just focus on one person! From Macy you got to get insight into the lives of her friends and the many issues plaguing them! There is something for everyone to identify with in this book!

The most prevalent aspect of this story is Macy and her “friendship” with Sam! Their relationship was one that started off shaky but grew stronger as time went on. Tough decisions were made and some hurt was caused but overall this story did not disappoint! It’s a story about real problems! What these kids faced are real issues and I love seeing this group stick by one another and just how strong they were! Friends and family who have your back truly do make a difference !

This book was a whim because I read the Wattpad version so I wanted to reminisce to that time, obviously, it had some work done and it didn't have the same appeal or charm.
Some characters were cut out and a lot of the dynamics we're just okay, the idea of the love triangle was more off-putting that I remember.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I read this book back when it was a Wattpad book and I read it so fast. I thought it was be fun to reread it as a published book. It didn’t disappoint!

I’m not even sure how to review this to be completely honest.

I requested this book after having previously read it on Wattpad, i do remember it being poorly executed and edited on Wattpad but figured I’d try it seeing as its now being professionally published. However nothing has changed, it still has that meh feel when trying to read it. It’s just so boring and dull, I feel like if another author had taken this storyline it might be better but I just wasn’t feeling this one. Sorry

I really enjoyed this book when I read it on Wattpad so I was excited to hear it was getting published. I flew through this book because it is such an easy read. The teens at my library are going to love this book because the main characters are so relatable.

It's so cool that this book is being published! Been quite some time since I've even remembered reading the original online, so it was an interesting experience to read it again.

The biggest things that changed for me in the reading process involve my impression of the characters as a whole. I understand why certain elements (family tree) were better off changed for the sake of the published novel, but I feel like in the cutting down process the characters lost a lot of their charm.

In particular though, this is likely because there are just so many characters to begin with! Like the extended friend group or family of the main characters, many of whom didn't really serve any real purpose in this book because they didn't have a lot of "air time" as I believe they did in the online version. I think this element of overloading with characters and not necessarily giving them any real roles in the novel detracted from the genuineness of the relationships that did seem more meaningful.

The main couple and their chemistry were written really well, but some of the author's choices with the development of their relationship and the overall love triangle were not appealing at all. I think it's easy to cast aside blame for the main pairing because "they're meant to be," but the way that the cheating aspect was written in was very very problematic and the resolution for it made it even worse somehow.

Still, the nostalgia of characters that I remembered liking a lot was something I enjoyed, though I don't think that from the lens of myself today I can really say I loved this book or would recommend it.

My thanks to Netgalley and Smith Publishing for the ARC opportunity!

3.5 stars!

I just want to start this by saying that I requested this on a whim when I was feeling weird and wanted to reminisce from when I read this when I was 12. I went into it knowing it wasn’t going to be a groundbreaking piece of literature, but rather a trip down memory lane.

This book centers around a girl named Macy Anderson, a girl with a huge group of guy friends and an avid soccer player. Macy is often labelled as the ‘tomboy’ and then, throw in Sam Cahill, local ‘bad boy’ (hence the title) and trouble ensues. This is a story about loss, friendship and relationships. It is a simple, basic Wattpad romance.

But, I enjoyed it.

It isn’t anything special but I have many fond memories of it that allowed me to enjoy it. I have a special soft spot for these characters. I knew who they were before going into this so it was easy to read and follow. I also felt that in this version, there was a focus on more important topics and it was given a more mature feel as a whole.

The only thing I was disappointed in was the fact that so much of it had been cut out...I remembered a lot more happening in the Wattpad story and it was weird to read a version without certain scenes I remembered loving from the original. I also did not remember how bad the cheating storyline was in this book and this time around, as I have matured much since I was 12, I did not enjoy it and it took away from the ending for me.

Overall, it was fun to go back to these characters that I remember so vividly and take a little trip down memory lane.

Thanks again to NetGalley for providing me a copy of this ARC in exchange for this honest review.

Thanks to the publisher for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I know someone is going to say I should have expected to dislike this book because of the stigma surrounding Wattpad but yes, while Wattpad's website allowing anyone to publish has resulted in a lot of really awful books, books that make it to physical publishing should logically be at the same caliber as other books in their genre. I've read Wattpad published books I loved and Wattpad published books I hated.

The Bad Boy and The Tomboy falls closer into the latter catagory. It's not awful but it's also nowhere near good. Everything works fairly linearly and it had a very 'write as you go' feel and considering the 4 year difference between this being released and the story being written on Wattpad, I'd assumed a lot of time likely went into rewrites and edits to make it a more cohesive story but I have a feeling very little was changed. The only seed that's really planted early on is Sam's nickname for Macy and while it's super clear why he chose it the book doesn't tell you until about halfway through so I was expecting a big emotional payoff but it was more like Sam going "yeah this is why" and then the plot moving forward onto the next thing. It was an interesting concept with a lackluster follow through and the book is full of them.

This book also features cheating protagonists who never show any significant guilt for said cheating, and weird, virtue signaling style diversity.

Don't get me wrong. Writing a diverse cast is great but you can really tell here that the supporting cast is diverse just for the sake of being diverse. There's this one particular scene where we're being introduced to Macy's friend group and every time anyone says a word we get a "This is [name] they are [race breakdown] they have [2 distinguishing features, likely stereotypical of said racial breakdown] and they like to [activity]." We never get to know anything about a character before the narration goes "they're half this, half this, and they speak these languages! Look how diverse my friend group is!" which is made extra weird by Macy's black best friend being introduced by responding to Macy asking what Sam looks like with "he's white" and Macy saying something about how "that's everyone at school but you" so she can tell us how black Jasmine is but then a scene later none of Macy's other friends are white either? Do you get what I'm saying about follow through?