I Kissed Shara Wheeler was one of my most anticipated books of the year and I’m happy to say that it did not disappoint! I really enjoyed this one and it’s themes throughout. It tackles some sensitive topics in the best way and gives each of the characters a great storyline.

First off, I was intrigued by this book because it takes place in a Christian school in Alabama. It shows how living in the Bible Belt influences how you see yourself and those around you and it truly described the experience in such a truthful way. I’m from the South and I thought that the author did a great job with showing what small town life in Alabama is like without condemning Christianity.

I think that the best part in this book, though, were the characters. I loved both Chloe and Shara and how complex their personalities are. I went back and forth on deciding whether on not they were good people, but then started to realize that they are, they’re just flawed like everyone else. The side characters were also great and I enjoyed seeing everyone’s journey to finding who they really are.

The relationships were good as well and I thought that the enemies-to-lovers story with Chloe and Shara was unique and realistic. I’m really glad that Chloe, Rory, and Smith became friends as well and I loved Georgia too! It was nice seeing how people don’t always fit their stereotypes, such as Smith not being a typical Jock. It was also super cute that Georgia’s family owned a bookstore!

I thought that the ending was realistic and bittersweet. It reminded me a lot of my senior year and how everyone starts to find themselves and go their separate ways. I’d love to see what happens to the characters in the future.

I recommend this one because of the accurate storytelling, unforgettable characters, and interesting plot. Thank you NetGalley, Macmillan, Wednesday Books, and Casey McQuiston for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! I’d also like to note that I got a copy of the audiobook, which I really enjoyed. The narration was great and enhanced the story a lot and it was pleasing to listen to. I recommend trying the audiobook for this one.

To start, I received an audio ARC of this story as well as a digital ARC. I did not listen to the entire story as I switched back and forth between both versions. Comments on the audio are as follows -- the narrator has an easy voice to listen to, very pleasant when there were dips without dialogue. The delivery was well done and I felt the emotions during the heightened scenes as she read with depth and meaning. My only complaint is that the audio felt like it was underwater. I don't know if this is a Netgalley audio issue or directly correlated with the novel.

I went in thinking it would be a story I've heard before. The story of Paper Towns mixed with the manipulative nature of Gone Girl and One of Us is Lying. It was all of those things, but it was also a refreshing take on relationships of ALL kinds.

The beginning of the story grated on me a bit. Chloe was so hyper-fixated on Shara that I could see the storyline playing out exactly as it did... losing friendships, losing focus, and the rollercoaster of inner turmoil we experienced on behalf of Chloe.

I wish we would have gotten multiple POVs. I would die to know what my babies Smith and Rory were thinking. I also wanted to know what Benji, Ace, Ash, and Georgia were up to while Chloe was tunnel visioning her way toward Shara!!

Chloe finding the letter from Shara that was for "Chloe's eyes only" was when I really bought into the rest of the story. What really shook me was when Shara showed up 70% of the way through. There was so much novel left!!!! was a little confused about what kind of book this was supposed to be. Were we reading a mystery that needed to be solved, were we reading a rom com, we we reading about teenage rebellion and changing the narrative around queer relationships and the church? I wasn't quite sure which direction we were going at any point. Not saying a novel has to be one or the other or cannot be a combination of all of these things, but I felt like they were all only 3/4 flushed out.

THINGS I LOVED:
The conversations around pronouns and names and how all of the kids were so open to learning from each other. I think the fact that Chloe was the only person out at her school, yet students willingly had discussions about gender identity, sexual orientation and pronouns was a beautiful statement to safe spaces within unsafe environments.

TWO! MOMS! Uhg I loved Chloe's moms.

I think the setting of this novel was perfect. It's a hyper conservative Christian school where students are punished for showing an ounce of individuality and everyone takes it as law. It felt very footloose and it made the conclusion of the story all that more satisfying.

ANYWAY, thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for giving me an ARC in exchange for my honest (yet all too wordy and messy) review.

I think it is time to admit that Casey Mcquiston is just not an author I enjoy. Natalie Naduis is my favorite audiobook narrator and even she couldn't save this for me.

Can Casey McQuiston write a bad book??? I'll admit I was wary going into this one. I read lots of YA fantasy, but I usually avoid YA contemporary like the plague. I'm not the intended audience for a book written about high schoolers—or the LGBTQ+ community, for that matter—but this was an absolutely DELIGHTFUL book and it's now in my top three YA contemporary books ever.

This book, at the core, is a love story. Yes, there's romance in it, but it's not really a romance book. It's a mystery, and while that mystery is sometimes about trying to figure out where the girl the MC is obsessed with disappeared off to, sometimes the real mystery is where her place is in a community that seems designed to repel girls like her.

The book captures the southern small town vibe perfectly: the façade of perfection, the misuse of out-of-context Scripture to keep everyone in their place, and the people who live on the fringes—or sometimes right in the middle of it, hiding behind a mask—who don't live up to the standards placed on them. Sometimes I relate to Chloe; other times, it's Shara or Rory or Smith or Georgia or Ace. All the characters are so delightfully themselves, all distinct and beautiful and queer and perfect in the signature McQuiston style that I've grown fond of. Everyone should read this book!

I read the ARC of this book because I was SO excited to get my hands on the next thing McQuiston wrote. Unfortunately, it was my least favorite of her works. It read very young. It took a LOT of effort for me to keep focused throughout.
I don't think anything will ever live up to the masterpiece that was Red, White, and Royal Blue.

Loved it! A YA romance with a bit of mystery- such a fun read! McQuistonis so good at writing friendships and the way that the three 'kissed' characters coming together and finding each other was heartwarming to read.

I’ve been waiting for this book for so long and I’m proud to say it didn’t disappoint. Join Chloe, Rory and Smith on their quest to try to find out why they were kissed and ditched by Shara Wheeler. All the characters are written perfectly including our main character Chloe. Chloe is somewhat “selfish” there’s nothing she loves more than winning and she’s willing to do anything to prove a point and win. Although she doesn’t make the best decisions she is still redeemable because of how well Casey writes her. I know some people have been complaining about Chloe’s personality but I think everyone should understand nobody is perfect especially a high school girl who is always looking forward to winning. It’s also interesting how the whole Alabama Christian environment is compared to SoCal’s environment. As it feels as many can relate to this feeling of feeling safe then getting your whole live turn around. Overall the book has so much representation in so many ways and I think everyone should read it. I absolute love it.

Another great book by this author! Was so excited to get this arc. Definitely a must read that I'll be sharing to my friend

I enjoyed Casey McQuiston's previous two novels and I had high hopes for this one. It did not disappoint! This is the story of Chloe, Smith and Rory who have all kissed Shara right before she disappears. So even though they have nothing else in common, they band together to find and decipher the clues Shara has left behind so they can find her.

There's so much more to the story, of course. It's about the religious town/school they attend, how most of the kids (and adults) do not have the freedom to be who they are. How things are not what they seem. How when we look at the world, we make assumptions about others and how easy their lives must be.

It's a fun and poignant story. I loved it.

With gratitude to netgalley and Macmillan Audio for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book was so fun. The mystery of why and where was so well written. High school drama but relatable even at my age. Who knew that was possible? I gave 4 instead of 5 stars because several parts felt like the ending but then dragged on.

This was an absolute delight. Jealous of every teenager reading this - all we had in my day was Annie on my Mind. So many tropes, so little time. Ace narration. I believe this is what they call a romp.

3.5 Stars

I Kissed Shara Wheeler is a coming of age story full of characters that are complex, deeply flawed, and trying to find out who they are compared to who they think they are while trying to find their place in the world. Casey McQuiston had a realistic approach to growing up as a queer teenager in the Bible Belt and the conflicting feelings that come with it. There were certain things that were executed incredibly well, however there were others that caused me to take away some stars. I found Chloe to be incredibly obtuse and could not fathom why she kept up the hunt for Shara. Long story short, I just didn't connect well with the mystery of the missing Shara Wheeler.

While this book wasn't my favorite, I would recommend it if you are looking for a LGBTQ+ romcom or if you enjoyed Paper Towns by John Green. Highly Recommend the audiobook version narrated by Natalie Naudus, it is very well done. I'm looking forward to reading whatever Casey McQuiston writes next.

I want to say thank you to St. Martins Press, Wednesday Books and MacMillan Audio for allowing me access to an ARC via Netgalley.

Well it took three books, but I’m finally aboard the Casey McQuiston bandwagon. And oddly enough, it’s coming in the form of her YA contemporary debut - the one genre I connect with the least at this point in my life.

Even in the past when I haven’t absolutely loved McQuiston’s books, I could recognize how exceptional she was at writing fully realized characters - people I felt like I could run into at the grocery store, or sit next to on an airplane. They aren’t the generic outlines of a person with a motive and a few hobbies. They have histories, and quirks, and specific habits that only an author who has spent time piecing together little bits of the real people around her can capture in a character. I Kissed Shara Wheeler has done that to the n-th degree from the main character Chloe’s group of queer drama-kid friends to her diamond-encrusted crucifix-wearing prep school classmates.

Chloe is a sharp, acerbic narrator that is quick to make immediate and broad-sweeping judgements on the people of False Beach. She wants to categorize people as generic stereotypes of the ultra-conservative environment they were raised in, even admitting she finds her “group” and deems them the only people worth knowing in this small Southern community. It’s a character that could come across as incredibly unlikeable if it wasn’t so apparent from page one that she has the capacity to want to understand these people. She sees herself as open-minded, but her entire character arc is her learning how to actually reserve judgment before jumping to conclusions.

But as much as this book is a coming-of-age story, it’s also a romance. A romance, with a mystery at the center - or maybe it’s the other way around. We learn as Chloe does how Shara was not the perfect, bible-thumping Harvard-bound girl the entire town thinks she is. But she’s also not the monster Chloe has tried to paint her to be as her one rival for valedictorian. This had me re-living visceral flashbacks from my own much less romantic saga of battling out for valedictorian in high school. Casey Mcquistion just gets it. And she did it in a series of pink envelope clues Chloe spends the book digging up across town with her quarterback and E-boy sidekicks.

If I were to nitpick anything in this book, it’s the big grand finale speech Chloe delivers - which was in fact a literal speech - that came across a bit campy to me. But even this aligned with the general tone and outrageousness of the rest of the plot and didn’t feel out of place in the story. It just gave off very strong Tumblr “and then everyone clapped” vibes.

But anything negative I have to say about this book is completely overshadowed by the way I completely connected with the way McQuistion captured the strange nuances of a small town. She’s got it down to a science - from the way aimlessly wandering the local Walmart becomes the thing to do after school, to the unreasonable fixation around the only Olive Garden in town. But she also understands how to write about this environment, and point out its many flaws, without disparaging the people who are a product of these communities. There is no black and white here, and I Kissed Shara Wheeler captures that in a way that acknowledges this balance.

I don’t know if this book is going to be as much of a universal crowd-pleaser as Casey McQuiston’s adult romances were. But for all the overachieving Gen-Z readers who aren’t far from that time when high school felt like the entirety of their world - or young adult readers who are living that now - I think this is a guaranteed win. McQuiston’s delivered my perfect YA contemporary romance, a series of four words I never thought I could string together.

Thank you to the publisher St. Martin’s Press for providing an ARC via NetGalley for an honest review.

I Kissed Shara Wheeler gives Paper Town vibes. I enjoyed Paper Towns premise but the book and movie both fell flat for me. I was hopeful IKSW would take this premise and improve upon it. Sadly I just didn't connect with the story or characters. The narrator did a great job. Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for an advance audiobook. 3 stars.

Such a great listen. Great narration and a great story. Every character is so well thought out and complex. Casey McQuiston’s writing gets better and better with every subsequent book, and this one is funny and moving and does a great job of showing so many things and people without anything feeling shoehorned in. Nothing about this book feels condescending; it’s generous and smart and does what good YA should—treats its characters as full human beings who still have a lot of growing to do.

I went into this book not expecting much out of it other than to pass the time. I’m am a complete fantasy girl, but ended up absolutely loving this. Chloe is such a bad bitch and I adore her inner (and outer) monologue. I listened to this, and I loved how the storyteller differentiated all of the different characters so well that sometimes I forgot that they were all one person. I laughed and cried and felt my heart grow so very happy when the different characters came to realize and accept certain things about themselves— things that they were raised to not believe in in their small town Alabama. I can’t wait to get my hands on a physical copy in a couple months and reread and fall in love with them all over again

Chloe Green has spent the last four years at her Christian high school in small-town Alabama ruthlessly competing for valedictorian with her nemesis and town golden girl, Shara Wheeler. When Shara unexpectedly kisses Chloe in an elevator and vanishes less than 24 hours later, leaving behind only a pink envelope with a cryptic clue, Chloe is determined to do whatever she can to solve the mystery and find Shara before graduation.

Chloe quickly discovers that she's not the only one Shara kissed before she fell off the face of the Earth, and she's also not the only one with a pink envelope and a seemingly indecipherable clue. Smith, the high school quarterback and Shara's longtime boyfriend, and Rory, the bad boy next door, are also desperate for answers. Will Chloe, with the help of Smith, Rory and the odd clues Shara left behind, be able to track her down before their graduation so Chloe can finally win the title of valedictorian fair-and-square?

This book is McQuiston's YA debut, and boy did they <i>deliver</i>. The book deals with heavy themes such as religious trauma, particularly related to queerness, and dealing with homophobia in small-town Alabama. While these are definitely important content warnings, McQuiston handles these topics with care, and without taking an anti-faith stance. The teens in this book are all at different stages of finding themselves and coming to understand how they fit into the world as young queer people, and it's queer community, even in the face of extreme adversity, that shows them that even in small-town Alabama, they aren't alone.

For someone who reads a lot of romance, I realize it's pretty weird that this is the first Casey McQuiston that I've read (though I did read some of Red, White, and Royal Blue a few years ago and didn't finish it for reasons I don't totally remember).

I would rate this 3.5 stars personally but also know that many students I teach, both at the high school and college level, will LOVE this book, which makes me glad to recommend it. This struck me as a Looking For Alaska/Paper Towns read-alike but happier, infused with heavy enemies-to-lovers vibes, which I think is going to be a real success for a lot of readers.

For me, Chloe was kind of a lot to take as a narrator at times—partially because she's apparently excessively dense about her own feelings, as well as the feelings of the people around her, and because she seems a bit too mean-spirited at times (but is thankfully called out for that eventually). I also read this on audio and wasn't a big fan of the narrator, which tends to hinder my enjoyment of a novel.

On the plus side, I really appreciated the nuanced handling of religion/Southern identity/queerness in this and how all those things tangle together. Much of the novel approaches those things from one perspective (Chloe's, as our POV character), but I think it was really refreshing to see that "single story" challenged a bit here and for Chloe to grow in her understanding of all of those things.

I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

|| YA romantic comedy, academic rivals-to-lovers, LGBTQIAP+ rep, wlw, queer/bi MCs, trans/nb/questioning rep

Format: Audiobook - Narrator was excellent! Same narrator as One Last Stop and she did an amazing job voicing all the characters!

After reading One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston, I vowed to read anything she wrote in the future. When I read the synopsis of IKSW, I knew I had to read it too. And like her other books, McQuiston did not disappoint!

I Kissed Shara Wheeler is a mix of John Green's Paper Towns and if Mean Girls was slightly less, well, mean ( think more queer and less toxity)

I Kissed Shara Wheeler takes place in a rural Alabama town in a private christian high school, where being different is punished and preached against. In a place where being queer is not accepted and most kids are fearfully in the closet or repressing their innermost selves and desires. The book follows high achiever Chloe Green as she looks for clues for why Shara, her nemesis for valedictorian, kissed her one day and then disappeared, leaving a trail of notes for Chloe and an unlikely alliance of Shara's boyfriend, Smith, and her boy-next-door friend Rory, helping Chloe trace the puzzle of clues to Shara's location. Along the way, they discover more about who Shara was and who they themselves truly are and truly want to be, in a place that makes it hard to be anything outside of the status quo.

I was worried for a bit that it was a "too on the nose" knock-off of Paper Towns, but by putting the characters themselves at the center of the plot development, instead of the search for the elusive Shara, McQuiston turns the trope on its head as a means to self-discovery for all of the characters rather than a play for a problematic manic pixie dream girl/cruel trick by an academic rival. I was worried terribly that I was growing to hate Shara until her own motivations became clearer and the unraveling of the complexities of who she and the other characters were, began to come undone. The thing about McQuiston is that all her characters are just so real. In I Kissed Shara Wheeler, every character is so raw, real, emotional, and vulnerable, they are flawed in ways that you can't help but be both exasperated and desparately rooting for them to win. The book was chocked full of beautiful complex queer characters with many varying perspectives of what it meant to be queer. The ending was just pure queer positivity that was cute and fun to read and while some of the positivity felt a bit more fairy tale than reality, the conversation around queerness in a small town really captured the experience.

This is the kind of book that rural kids in the south and midwest need to read, to see themselves in these characters. As a person who grew up in a fundamentalist southern baptist church, who didn't see let alone even know much about, healthy ways of being and living as queer or queer relationships, a book like this would have changed my life. As a so-deep-in-the-closet-I-was-lying-to-myself person who later realized I was bisexual once I was able to see other types of love and relationships in media and in real life, seeing much of myself reflected in McQuiston's characters was healing and wonderful. So much of Shara's repressed feelings for Chloe and her way of handling them, from throwing herself into making valedictorian to trying to make Chloe really see her for her, resonated deeply with me. Watching Smith explore his gender expression and realize his own sexuality and feelings, realizing that being "told" boys are only supposed to do this thing and feel this way was not the only way a person could be, was absolutely beautiful. Showing the nuance of so many characters wanting to be themselves while also having to tread lightly and stay closeted for fear of their family finding out, being kicked out or disowned, or having to come to terms with their complicated feelings about faith and identity -- these are all things that those of us who grew up in the church or in families who did not allow exploration outside of heterosexual relationships or anything but cisgender binary expressions of identity, know so intimately.

This book is a beautiful, lighthearted, positive story about the realities of being closeted and queer in rural christian america, and it looks at both the ugly and the beautiful of growing up in places like this. It's a book I wish I could give to my younger self to say, see? Look, there are other people out there like you, you are not alone, you'll find your people soon, don't give up hope. But it's also fun and cute and a great YA romantic comedy about being a teenager and just trying to figure yourself out and where you fit in the world.

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the audiobook ARC!

In the same manner as Red, White & Royal Blue this is a delightful story. What I love about YA is it’s ability to deftly deal with a wide range of subject matter and this book did just that. There are a lot of characters to keep up with but almost all of them had many wonderful qualities that made them endearing. Yes, there were some cheesy moments, but there were also some very important conversations and topics covered.

The audio narration was well done but with all the different people chatting it might be better to read this one. It’s sometimes a bit distracting when one person tries to change their voice 8 times in a five minutes period. But they might just be me.

If you enjoyed Red, White & Royal Blue you’ll enjoy this one too!

Thank you @netgalley and @macmillanaudio for the advanced listening copy in exchange for an honest review.

(I will post my review to Goodreads and insta closer to pub day)