This was an extremely quick read. I didn't expect it to go as fast as it did, and my usual gripe with YA is that it drones on too long, but this was just way too short. The plot felt a bit rushed, I didn't understand how they all fell in love, and it didn't feel like there was much conflict at all if I'm being completely honest. It all just felt a bit bland.

A LGBTQ rom com inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest? SIGN ME UP. The story follows two best friends, prom, crushes, and finding family. Jane Worthing is famous, and she is a viral sensation known as the #BAGBABY- for being discovered as a one year old in an oversized Gucci Bag by her adopted father in a train station. Years later she is now in her senior year of highschool and her best friend secretly steals her spit and submits a family dna search... and has found her a match. Now Jane has to question if she is ready to meet her potential family. Along for the ride is Jane’s cousin Cecil who is absolutely in love with Jane’s best friend Algie, and Algie’s beautiful cousin who Jane has had an all consuming crush on since forever, Gwen Fairfax. Now Jane has to navigate meeting her birth family, protecting Cecil from potential heartbreak from her best friend Algie, and maybe just maybe getting a date from Gwen. Throw in cute movie dates, mischievous best friends, a wonderful support system, and this was just an overall super sweet and cute story. I loved the friend group and the romance between Gwen and Jane was really cute. Just a short and sweet read!

*Thanks Netgalley and Clarion Books (formerly HMH Children's Books), Clarion Books for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*

A retelling of Oscar Wilde's classic "The Importance of Being Ernest". This book was a quick and fun read. I adored this cast of characters and their relationships with each other.

Thank you NetGalley for giving me an early copy to review!

I am a sucker for queer love stories and this was no exception. Janey and Algie were such a cute couple... of bffs! I was a little disappointed with Gwen and Janey's relationship and I felt that there was not a lot of chemistry between them. I did like the feeling of a found family, both Janey's parents and biological aunt and cousin as well as her friend group. The book was fun and chill and I loved the Oscar Wilde references.

i can only describe this book as epically awful. the characters were dull, the writing childish, and the plot entirely without depth.

I liked this a lot! It was definitely a very slice-of-life-y book were not a ton happened outside of the developing romances, but I loved all the characters and had a lot of fun reading it.

This is an absolutely adorable, feel-good, rom-com of a book. The characters felt fully realized, the writing was very smooth, and I spent the whole book smiling. Jane's relationship with Gwen was sweetly awkward and earnest, her friendship with Algie was nuanced and real, and I love the way they handle her exploration of her identity and finding her bio family. Would recommend.

Despite a premise that I was excited about, the book feel flat for me. I had difficulty losing myself in the story and didn't feel particularly invested in it. I think I will try it again at another point just to see if I was in a reading slump, but for a first reading, I felt pretty "Meh" about it, and struggled to finish the book.

Thank you to NetGalley for this arc in exchange for an honest review!

4.5⭐️
I want to start off by saying I have not yet read The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, so my review will not be related to that. This was a very fun read. I loved Jane’s inner monologue; at times it felt very movie-ish (in a good way). The writing style was cute and somewhat ramble-y, but I liked it because it only added to Jane’s character. I loved the characters. Jane, Gwen, Algie, and Cecil, each felt so unique and were very enjoyable to read about.

Jane’s growth throughout the book was clear, and very enjoyable. I found her to be a very interesting MC and narrator. From her long time crush on Gwen to her thoughts on reaching out to her biological family, it was fairly easy to understand her perspective and see her growth. Clear growth is one of my FAVORITE things in a book!!

Epically Earnest by Molly Horan is a modern rom-com take on The Importance of Being Earnest. Jane is a senior in high school who had a bit of a internet-viral introduction to the world- she was found in a handbag in the NY subway as a baby! Though she is adopted by the bachelor who found her, the video will follow her around for the rest of her life. Her dad finds love several years after he adopts Jane, and she is brought up by her loving, maybe-too-involved-for-comfort, parents. Add in her quirky, uber-rich, gay best friend, Algie, and she has a pretty decent life going. The only thing that seems to be missing is romance- and a date to the prom. Not that Jane doesn‘t have a crush, she has a MASSIVE crush on Algie‘s smart, beautiful, confident cousin Gwen, but she doesn‘t have the courage and confidence to act on her feelings. Add to the mix that Algie secretly sends off a sample of her DNA to find her biological family, and Jane‘s senior year is shaping up to be a wild one! Horan has a lovely, easy going writing style that isn‘t too ‚slangy‘ or ‚hip with the kids 😅, which keeps the novel from moving from sweet and funny into cloyingly saccharine territory. There are some funny moments and a good bit of soul-searching and confidence building throughout, but for me, it was a bit lukewarm. I liked the characters enough, but I wasn’t really dying to find out what happens. For me, there is a lack of conflict or tension, and this meant that while it was an enjoyable read, it’s not one that will stay with me. Having said that, it was wonderful to read an LGBTQ+ book that didn’t fall back on trauma tropes or disasters or DRAMA and simply showed an everyday, typical teenage crush and romance (in all its angsty high school glory). And for that, I give Epically Earnest a big YAY! This one is a must have for the classroom or school library. Random rating system 3.5/5. The publish date for this one is in July. As always thank you to @NetGalley for the eARC.

Epically Earnest is charming - but other than the title and the names of the characters, I wouldn’t call it a modern queer retelling of The Importance of Being Earnest. Luckily, it stands on its own as a contemporary YA with good queer representation - it is very sweet.

This was a cute book filled with very likable characters. The two main plot lines are Janey’s romantic interest in Gwen and wanting to invite her to prom, and Janey’s search for her bio family.
The missing stars for me are because both plot lines are pretty much resolved very early on in the story, so there is no real urgency to continue reading. With that said, I really liked the ending and wasn’t bored at any point. Overall I think it’s a book that could really be enjoyed by young adults, especially LGBTQ+ youth who can find it relatable and not as heavy as others in this genre.

Jane Worthing is a typical high school senior with the usual things on her mind, like graduation, her friends, and asking the girl she has been crushing on since middle school to prom. A short romantic teen read.

This story was a light read, with at times overtly pretentious lines of thought from the characters. On the whole it was a sweet story with a happy ending. I found that outside of some internal turmoil, there was no real conflict in the story. It was low stakes, with no great obstacles.

Overall an enjoyable young adult read for a rainy afternoon.

A laugh out loud comedy of errors that had a huge smile plastered on my face from start to finish - highly recomnended

I really love The Importance of Being Earnest, so I was very curious to see how it would be adopted for a contemporary setting. It was a lot of fun to see which elements of the play made it in and in what way. I enjoyed the friendships and the banter.

Oh this was such a fun read. I adore Oscar Wilde, so naturally a queer retelling of one of my favourite plays was bound to be a good read. It was such a fun and heartwarming and, well, earnest story and I just fell in love. I liked that there wasn't necessarily a villain or a bad guy, just hard circumstances and emotional stakes to overcome. Also, it was hilarious! I absolutely loved it.

Really sweet and fun. I do wish the author had embraced the sheer goofiness and the ludicrous energy of coincidence from the source material, but it's not really one of the goals of The Importance of Being Earnest to be "believable", so I see why when translating the bones into a cute, modern day, young adult romance, she did not. Still plenty funny, though!

This is such a precious story of senior year endings and beginnings. I found all characters to be very likable yet different and interesting in their own ways. The first third of the book went by so quickly, which I think is due to the writing style (even though the chapters are a bit long, at least compared to the book I read before this one). The middle third was a bit slow and I would have liked more build up of the romance, but the last third totally stole my heart! I enjoyed the themes beyond just the romance (but also the romance element was just so cute). Overall, I enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend it!

This is a fun and heart-warming story. When Janey was only one year old, she was abandoned in a bag in a Poughkeepsie train station. She was discovered a single, twenty-something man who decided to adopt her. Her father got married when Janey was four, and, since then, the Worthings have been a tight family unit. Now a senior in high school, Janey is considering whether to search for her biological family. When her well-intentioned, but typically pushy, best friend Algie finds some of her biological relatives for her, Janey has to decide whether to reach out, potentially upending her home life, all while she is figuring out whether she has any chance with her long-time crush, Algie's cousin, Gwen. As Janey navigates these challenges over the last few months of her senior year, she learns about the nature of family and who she really wants to be.

I enjoyed this modern-day take on the Importance of Being Earnest. Janey is such a great character to spend time with, and the story deals with challenging topics with nuance, insight, and often humor. Highly recommended!

I received an ARC from NetGalley as an educator.

Firstly, let me just say that I adore Oscar Wilde—his witticisms, his insights into the absurdities of social norms, and his willingness to exploit those for comedy's sake is what makes his writing so engaging. Taking the basic style of Wilde and applying it to the teenager of the 21st century makes perfect sense, and on that point, Epically Earnest does a great job. Molly Horan even uses quotations from Wilde himself to start each chapter, alluding to the unfolding comedy to come.

I can't deny that I enjoyed these characters—the utter campiness of Algernon (a name lifted straight from The Importance of Being Earnest), the tentativeness of Janey, the boldness of Gwen, and the adorable social awkwardness of Cecil. I loved that each of these characters were unequivocally queer and living their truth. Their high school drama (Does she like me? Who should I go with to prom?) cuts in nicely with Janey's more pressing and urgent questions (Who am I if I don't know who my biological relatives are?). I enjoyed watching Janey grapple with all of this, and her coterie of side characters made that journey enjoyable.

However, I don't know that anything especially exciting or epic, as the title would insinuate, really happened here. There wasn't a massive conflict, really, or any big revelations. It was hard to understand where a lot of the stress in these characters' privileged lives came from. Janey didn't even have any problem landing a true love, and I felt their relationship and all of the other romantic relationships lacked development and spark. The angst just didn't quite land.

In the end, this was cute and entertaining; I can think of many students who would enjoy this for the sheer appreciation of seeing queer teenagers doing normal teenager things and to that end, I would recommend it to several of my students on that merit alone.