This was a really sweet coming of age sapphic romance, with some nice themes of family, fandoms, and friendship! I like the way the romance panned out, and the side characters were all lovely.

🌈Queer rep: main FF relationship, bi/pan female main character. Secondary lesbian character, bi/pan female character, bi & ace male character. Brief mentions of a nonbinary character.

I tried multiple times to pick up and get into this book and ultimately DNF'd it at around 30%. The book is incredibly character driven and has very little plot, so I found the pacing to be quite slow, and unfortunately I did click with Elise's character. (I will note I am not into fandom and I'm not Asian, so I'm probably not the target audience here.) I found her to be self centered and immature, and I really didn't enjoy her avoidant personality. I did feel like this gave a pretty genuine portrayal of fandom lovers and those parts were cute. Ultimately I did not find Elsie engaging enough as a character to read through a full character driven book about her.

I loved that grandmothers were a large part of this book. I am also close with my grandma and could definitely relate to many parts of this book. I love seeing any queer relationships in books, especially books for teens. So this was a fun and heartfelt time.

This is the homoerotic childhood friendship turned lovers book we all deserve! IF YOU STILL RECOGNIZE ME is such a beautiful, atmospheric, and overall incredible story with so much love packed into it. I'm a big fan!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for granting me free access to the advanced digital copy of this book, as this book has already been published, I will not share my review on Netgalley at this time.

I enjoyed reading this book and I flew through it. It was hard to put down and the characters were well-written. I found the plot enjoyable and not slow. The characters and their journeys were what the plot centered on and I like that. I cannot wait to read more from this author.

A wonderful and evocative sapphic book that delves into family, friendships, identity, and so much more. Tender and full of heart.

- thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an arc to review!

- a gorgeously written and heartfelt story of self discovery and love all in one summer. Cynthia So narrates a loving and struggling protagonist with nuance and care, and you end up rooting for Elsie as she navigates her feelings and identities, and what they mean to her. the other characters were amazing as well, adding onto to the believability and the nuance the story had to offer.

If You Still Recognize Me is a wonderful and sweet YA story about friendship, love, and family that really impressed as a debut. It follows Elsie, a girl who has recently finished high school and is determined to make her feelings for her online crush known over the summer. Just as she embarks on this journey, her former best friend, Joan, comes back into her life, complicating all of her plans. She's also facing her estranged Chinese staying with her for the summer after her grandfather's passing, getting her first job, and her first real fight with her best friend. This may seem like a lot, but Cynthia covers it all so well and reminds us that this is how life truly is. It is truly a story about Elsie finding herself in many ways, including her sexuality, her cultural identity, and her passions in life.

This book does a lot well, including small details. Elsie and her crush are deep into online fandom, and this isn't done in any sort of cringy way. It feels real and honest, and it was nice to see this character transfer that passion into her real life. I liked that her friends never judged or questioned her for crushing on someone she knew from the internet, or questioned the validity of the connection. Another thing that's done well is the slow burn of the actual romance. It's so sweet. I also think the familial relationships are truly excellent.

Ultimately, I liked this so much. It's perfect for fans of Alice Oseman's Radio Silence or I Was Born for This. I'm super excited to see what Cynthia So does next.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher HarperCollins Children's Books, and the author Cythnia So for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. This book is for you if you enjoy the genre of YA, coming of age, queerness, fandoms, and lesbians. This book takes an intersectional approach to those themes and explores the space of them well. This book is a good light breeze after you read something heavy.

4.5 Stars!

It took me a minute to get into this book but then I could not put it down. This is a beautiful YA book filled with sapphics, lost loves, past friendships, and a queer summer!

Elsie has found herself online, reading comics and making friends within the comic fandoms she's interested in, including fanfic writer Ada. Ada lives in NY, and Elsie, in London, pines after her. She has a huge crush on Ada and wants to figure out how to tell her, but just cannot figure out the right way. Ada tells Elsie about these letters her grandmother exchanged with another woman and the sapphic undertones. The woman lives in the town that Elsie is traveling to with friends this summer, so she thinks this is the perfect way to woo Ada!

But in comes Joan, Elsie's best friend who had moved to Hong Kong 8 years ago, when they promptly lost contact, even after promising to write letters. They've both changed, almost swapping styles, but they still have that same connection they've always had. She joins on the trip and is along for the plan to reunite these women and see if true love might exist between them still, if it ever did!

This book was so beautiful and handled so many topics without feeling overwhelming. So often a book will try to handle a lot and it'll feel unfinished, but I felt like it all existed in harmony and nothing felt forgotten. It was a beautiful story with a lot of queerness, including an ace-spec side character. The queer elders were wonderful to read about and to see Elsie seeing happy queer adults felt like something she truly needed.

I definitely recommend this - it's such a beautiful summer sapphic read, including lots of letters, a lot of fandom/comic talk, and some of the best friends a girl could ask for! Though there are definitely some tougher aspects, like previous toxic relationships, homophobia in family dynamics, and a death of a grandparent, it all felt balanced and complete.

If You Still Recognize Me is about Elise, a bisexual British-Hong Kong teen, just trying to make it through the summer between secondary school and university. There is a lot going on in her life as her grandma is visiting for the first time in eight years, she’s trying to find a job, crushing on her fandom friend, and her childhood friend reappears after years of radio silence.

I really enjoyed this book! I felt it was able to juggle all of the aforementioned plot points really well and all contributed to Elise’s character development. I did want more between Elise and her friend, Ritika, because I feel some things weren’t fully hashed out.

I loved how queer so many of the main characters were and how they all are queer in different ways. Each character is at a different stage in their queer journey; there are old and young queer characters and some are completely out to family, some aren’t at all.

I enjoyed this book and rated this book 3.5 stars!

This book was so freaking good. I teared up and squealed at so many parts. To have had something like this growing up would’ve been a game changer for my self discovery but that it exists now is an incredible thing. Absolutely adored our MC and she was so relatable and I just felt instantly connected to her and her experiences. Truly a masterpiece. One of the best coming of age stories I’ve read in a while. The pacing was great too and the dialogue between characters was so realistic and I felt like I was experiencing my teen years again.

If You Still Recognize Me is a sweet, coming of age story about a bisexual 18 year old girl who is just beginning to come to terms with her sexuality. This book hits on so many topics - the issues of being a LGBTQIA Asian girl growing up in London, Chinese culture and its attitude toward toward the LGBTQIA community, an old lost love, fan fiction, a new relationship - this book is packed full of it all. I am not the target audience, but found myself caring about the characters and really enjoying this novel.

Oh my gosh there was so much happening in this book. And after finishing I can recognize that this book almost needs this many moving parts but in the moment it was a lot borderline too much. There's so many characters to follow and so many plot points that things get muddled and confusing and I feel like we lose a little bit of time with our main character.

IYSRM follows Elsie, a bi girl in the UK who has just one summer before starting at Cambridge for uni. Elsie is determined to use this summer to finally admit her crush on her Internet best friend, Ada. But then her childhood best friend comes back into the picture and Elsie’s summer turns into a whirlwind of evolving feelings, family secrets, and an attempt at reconnecting long-lost loves.

Elsie has so much of me: a queer girl who struggles to make friends, but when she does, it’s with her whole heart. An awkward person who uses fanfiction and fandom as an escape from her life, as something to keep her going. Even in our differences, there’s something about her that’s striking: where I’m obsessed with mounds of queer books, she’s obsessed with a queer-coded comic series. And as someone who is also academically-driven, I felt her need to escape into fiction in such a matter of fact way. Where I don’t crush on people, Elsie most certainly is in love with her Internet best friend, Ada. I can relate to that feeling of loving someone across thousands of miles, even if it isn’t romantic.

There are also so many parts of Elsie I don’t — and can’t — understand. I am not Chinese like Elsie, nor do I have trauma from a toxic relationship like she does. But the fact that she exists for other people too and has touched the lives of my friends — Meilin and Naomi, who I read this with, and Micah and Cel, who I admire — makes this book needed.

But beyond the characters, I loved the journey Elsie goes on, trying to reconcile who she was with who she is with who she wants to be. The romance, the friendships, the family relationships are all handled with such nuance and care. There’s something so special about how feelings evolve, how they can bloom into something unexpected and make you realize some of the most personal discoveries.

This book is for all Elsies out there: I hope you find that there will always be someone who recognizes you.

Trigger Warnings: homophobia and biphobia (internalized, targeted, microaggressions), toxic relationship recounted, off-page grandparent death, off-page disownment, internalized racism, fetish for Asian women by an off-page side character

i wanted to love this but i can’t do the “i’m in love with someone and am gonna spend 80% of the book gushing about them just to realize in the last 20% that i actually am in love with my best friend” trope. it was cute-ish tho i just didn’t care for this romance and also hated 99% of decisions the main character made. she was so dumb.

if any of my online friends ever decided to track down a random person from my grandma’s life without telling me, we would never speak again.

also, i know this was a love letter to fandom, but oh my god please stop bringing up tumblr we get it.

This was a great sapphic YA book with very important themes.
Elsie is a Chinese American bisexual girl, who just graduated high school. Her life is changing not only in this aspect, but her grandpa from China also just died and her grandma comes to live with them for a while. On top of that not only her grandma which she hasn’t seen in a decade unexpectedly steps into her life again, but her old best friend who moved to China years and never answered her e-mails also does.

It was a great story about family, what it’s like growing up as an asian woman in America (especially sexualisation!), toxic relationships, forming new (queer) friendships, reinvigorating old friendships and girl crushes.
While I loved every aspect of this book in itself, for me it was just a bit MUCH for one book.
There was also the family secret, the fanfic, the comic book store, the hunt for Theresa, her friends love life dramas, her one crush, then her other crush…it was simply a lot for one book. My brain was rattling. I wish it would have focused on one thing, or maybe two, but not 7 stories all in one.
I still think this is a good book many teens will enjoy and I absolutely loved to see a chinese American MC and family in a queer YA romance!

Cynthia So's "If You Still Recognize Me" is a sweet sapphic love story about friends reuniting after being out of touch over time and continents. This story follows Elsie, whose grandmother comes from Hong Kong to live with her family in England. She has a long-distance crush on her internet friend Ada who she bonded with over the comic Eden Recoiling and the fanfiction that Ada writes. However, Joan, Elsie's childhood best friend, re-enters her life after spending several years in Hong Kong.

Parallel to Elsie and Joan's rekindled friendship, the novel uses letters to tell the story of Theresa and Rebecca, Ada's grandmother, and her long-lost pen pal. Elsie and Joan use the summer to search for Rebecca and rekindle their friendship or possibly more.

In addition to the love story, So weaves in Elsie's journey about her identity as a queer person of Asian descent and the prejudices her family and friends may carry. The author's skillful storytelling and parallel narratives create a compelling exploration of reconnection and self-discovery. With its themes of love, friendship, and the power of finding oneself, this book is a heartfelt story about family, friends, and love.

adorable and fun to read book, great characters

Thanks to the publisher and netgalley for the review copy.