#NETGALLEYARC

3.5 🌟

This was a cute, YA novel with alot of representation. I did not enjoy the abrupt ending because I guess I wanted more! I wanted to know what happened when the sisters met again in person, the "meet the parents" during winter vacay, etc.

Title: Come As You Are
By: Dahlia Adler
Pub. Day: May 27, 2025

Genre:
Fiction, Young Adult, LGBTQ, Romance

Trigger Warnings:
Loss of Parent, Abandonment, Sexual Content, Profanity, LGBTQ, Grief, Toxic Relationships
(**more graphic content, situational content, and profanity than preferred for a young adult novel)

Summary/Review:
There’s a misunderstanding at Camden Academy, Everett Riley is placed in the boys dorm of a full private school with no alternative. The problem- she’s a girl, who goes by Evie. She leaves her old school after her sister and boyfriend had a thing going on without her knowing it. Evie is looking forward to a fresh start…that is until she is placed in the boys dorm. And so begins the coming of age tale involving self-discovery, and challenging the rules to find personal identity.

This is my first book by this author and it was different than I expected. The beginning started out strong, was engaging and very fast paced, however, about halfway through it, I found myself distracted, and I had trouble connecting with the characters. The content went a little further than my personal preference, but working with high schoolers, I see its value. If you enjoy other books by this author, then chances are you will really enjoy this book.

Thank you to Dahlia Adler, St. Martin’s Press, Wednesdays Books, and NetGalley for the opportunity of an Advanced Readers Copy. I am voluntarily leaving my personal review.

#ComeAsYouAre
#St.MartinsPress
#Wednesdaybooks
#advancedreadercopies
#NetGalley

This is a great story about friendship and growing up. I requested this solely based off the Rapunzel-like cover and I was not disappointed. What a great story! i can't tell you how many times i smiled while reading this. The supporting, diverse characters all brought something different to this story and it all tied together wonderfully. I loved Evie's energy and played a great protagonist. What a perfect book to rad during Pride Month!! i loved this and will absolutely look for more by this author.

I always love a good team up to get revenge story, I definitely loved Adler’s writing style even more this time around,

I just finished Come As You Are by Dahlia Adler and here are my musings.


When Evie is accepted into a boarding school she feels like it is her second chance. Until she arrives on campus to find she has been placed in the boys dorm. The only person who seems to get her is outcast adjacent Salem and they balance each other… The lifeline neither of them knew they needed.

I love a good character driven YA especially when it comes with really witty banter. This book had it all. It was funny…. It was emotional… It was real and it was entertaining.

I thought it tackled the sexual elements well and it all felt very real. I love that in a book. The dorms are a great place to set a book and I loved the boarding school angle. Now my biggest problem with the rushed romance at the end. I don’t think it was fleshed out enough and honestly, that was a big disservice.

The characters were all great though and I loved the dynamic with Salem and his sister Sabrina… (My inner teen was jumping up and down like a wild animal).

All in all I enjoyed the heck out of it. It was well written and clever!

4 stars

Thank you @netgalley and @stmartinspress. @wednesdaybooks for my gifted copy

Thank you to the publisher for an eARC of this book to read and review.

Themes/Tropes: Boarding School, good girl x bad boy, Friends to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Found Family

This felt like reading an Amanda Bynes early 2000s movie in the best way.

Everett has just had a terrible break up and betrayal, so she decides to go to boarding school to escape. Salem did something bad and was kicked out of his school.

When Everett, Evie, is mistaken for a male student, and there are no more rooms left, she is stuck living in the boys dorms for the school year. There she meets Salem, and she decides to stop being the "good girl" because it hasn't gotten her anywhere.

This book was funny, emotional, and honestly a great time. I loved the relationship between Salem and his sister, Sabrina (the names cracked me up). I also loved Salem and his roommate. I liked almost all of the main side characters and their relationship with Evie.

This is my second or third book by this author, and I really enjoy her writing style.

"Come As You Are" is really a teen book! YA authors these days typically teeter totter on the lines of being YA & NA. It was really cool to see this book staying its lane. It has the angst and exploration that teens go through as they grow up without making them overly sexualized. Well, actually, I kinda take that back. Our main character wasn't overly sexualized, but a couple of the characters were (Matt, mostly). The writing is what I expected from this genre.

Thank you NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for this arc!

This was a YA book?! Holy moly. Maybe I was just a little sheltered growing up, but a ladder for girls to sneak in thru the window? All the swearing and talking about sex? I don’t know.. I just really struggled with this book. Where were the adults at this boarding school? Hahah. It would work if these kids were seniors but we are talking sophomores! Either make them a little older HS kids or like freshman in college.

Come As You Are had a good premise, but unfortunately didn't hit the mark for me. I don't like when the MMC dates/had sex with/romantically entangles a different woman after meeting the FMC. I also think the FMC sound have been more mature overall, and I have my doubts that due would have been friends with this popular crowd. Overall, I wish this would have been "aged up" to college, rather than high school; I think it would have worked better and could have been a little spicier, which given the premise I believe it should have been given a more mature treatment.

3.5 stars This book has a lot going for it, the characters feel real and the story tackles some important themes with honesty. The pacing is steady, and it keeps you engaged without being over the top. With that, some parts dragged a little for me, and I wish a few moments had been a little sharper or deeper. It's heartfelt and relatable, but it doesn't fully hit the mark every time. Still, it's worth the read if you like character-driven stories that don't shy away from complicated feelings.

I listened to this on audio and I finished it between two work days so I'd say it's a really easy/fast read, but I think it fell flat for me. I was intrigued in the beginning but around the halfway mark I was easily zoned out while listening. I couldn't see the chemistry between Evie and Salem, and I didn't really like how fast Evie just forgave her family.

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thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me an eARC in exchange for my honest review. all thoughts are my own.

I got an ARC of this book.

Let me start with my biggest complaint about this book. This would have read so much better for me if this were a NA instead of a YA. The humor, the boarding school experience just read really heavily as college dorms, and a few other small details. It felt like the characters should have been a year or two older.

The humor was cute and I was often left surprised. The sexism was always called out as wrong. There was no enforcement of purity culture by the male love interest. Instead he was the first to say that it didn’t matter and that it was silly. He was being presented as an emotionally stunted bad boy stoner, but he really wasn’t. He was sweet from the beginning. He just wasn’t writing love poems all the time. He was pretty flawless, outside of smelling bad (per the MC).

The MC was interesting. She had some baggage and a great deal of that baggage was never able to be solved. It was wonderful that it couldn’t be resolved. It made the story feel more realistic. It also made the backstory feel more deeper and complex. It felt a bit shallow and annoying, just drama for drama sake at first. The longer it went on and the more that was revealed, the better it was fleshed out.

Not a lot of the side characters felt really fleshed out for me. The most fleshed out was the horndog that literally was known for having a different girl in his bed every night. The girls knew this and he even had a rope ladder out his window to make it happen. He was a good guy and it was wild just how fleshed out her got. The queer characters were just sort of sprinkled in, so it felt like it wasn’t a big deal.

I do not want to label this book as queer as these characters really don’t do much for the story overall. Having an ace best friend that isn’t on page for more than a chapter doesn’t make a book queer. Despite expecting more queerness, since it is tagged as queer everywhere I am seeing this book, the queer rep that was there was fun.

There were great one liners and weird banter. So overall, I really enjoyed this book.

Of all the young-adult contemporary fiction authors I've read, Dahlia Adler stands out among the rest. Her writing style and characterization really hit the mark for me. This is my favorite of her works so far, and I highly encourage giving her a try.

An A+ young adult romance, mainly friendship focused—and not just between the two leads. The heroine is learning to trust and to build friendships again in general, beginning to open up again after a pretty impactful triple betrayal (the double betrayal, we are all familiar with. But the triple?! Unprecedented). This novel is funny, with great secondary characters. It's also really nuanced in its treatment of sex and teen relationships, with a lot of emphasis on honesty and trust and contrasting relationships with those integral aspects firmly in place with those in which it is lacking.

4 Stars

This was my first book by Dahlia Adler in about ten years & I enjoyed it! It wasn’t heavy on the romance front and more YA dramedy with some romance added in.

I do think it was more on the adult side of YA in my opinion. A lot of swearing, sex & drug talk. Which yes, are all things teenagers hear about and deal with. But they seemed so young as little baby sophomores in my mid-thirties mind! I think I’d let my kids read this at 16+. It had great representation which I appreciated!

Thank you to NetGalley & St. Martin’s Press for the ARC of Come As You Are in exchange for an honest review!

I really tried liking this one and I couldn't get into it. I had a hard time connecting with the characters and the story. It felt long at first and confusing.

thank you to St Martin's Press and NetGalley for a copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

2.5 out of 5 stars

The boarding school setting was a fun addition. I also enjoyed the "oh no! A girl in a boy's dorm" debacle. However, I felt like these characters were acting way older than they were. I think this was more befitting of college students rather than freshmen and sophomores in high school. I thought this had themes that were fit for readers a bit older than YA, in my opinion. This had me wondering where all of the adults were. I wasn't really a huge fan of the characters as a whole and had a difficult time getting invested. I think the "bad boy" helping the good girl and vice versa is a fun aspect to the story and some of the banter was good. I think you would like this book if you like YA that reads older.

Ok so the more I think about this one, the more I had to take off a star. While this was no doubt fun and easy to finish in nearly 1 sitting, I did find this to overall feel unfinished and half baked.

The pact premise between Salem and Evie felt flimsy at best, but I did love seeing their activities and how each of them pushed the other. The bad fork day was especially very cute and funny. Overall I loved all the scenes with Salem and Evie, their banter and relationship felt very natural, same thing for his twin Sabrina and Evie as well.

And this is where I think the overall “romance” with Salem just wasn’t needed. They worked so well as friends with so little in terms of feelings or more being present honestly that when they ultimately do get together, it felt too abrupt and at the cost of a lot of other relationships that were brewing. The second half especially felt like it took an axe to a lot of the friendships and growth Evie was having by trying so hard to make her pivot into jealousy that it felt jarring. It felt like Evie and Sabrina started to have a more superficial friendship at the cost of giving Salem and Evie more moments with Salem being the first person Evie confides in for 2 major secrets which made me wonder when, if ever, she would tell Sabrina, which contrasted sharply with the beginning with how Sabrina was Evie’s rock and who she first explains her home drama to.

There’s also a secret Evie keeps where by the end, I can’t even say the mental gymnastics given to justify keeping it were there, it’s more so a glancing statement that Evie will continue the charade and secret for very flimsy reasons. It was especially out of character yet because by the end of the book, Evie seems to come through on the other side of her home drama, yet this secret very similarly reflect that situation and Evie chooses to do nothing about it. Even as she sees another girl being set up like she was. Never mind that Evie again never confides in Sabrina…

So ultimately, while this was fun, I feel like it was at least 50-100 pages too short, trying to shoe horn in a romance at the end at the cost of significant developments in Evie’s character and Evie’s relationship with others, both of which were main drivers in the beginning — not getting a boyfriend.

This was my first Dahlia Adler book and now I totally understand the hype. I was hooked from the very first page and didn’t want to put it down.

Kayla is such a layered character. I really felt for her as she tried to navigate what she wanted, who she was, and how to move forward after everything she’s been through. Em was the perfect counterpart. Steady, grounded, and a little mysterious in the best way. Their chemistry felt so natural and the slow build made every moment between them feel earned.

I also really enjoyed the friend group and the way the school setting added just enough chaos and comfort. There were moments of humor, introspection, tension, and growth, all wrapped up in a very satisfying romance.

Thank you to NetGalley and Wednesday Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Really cute contemporary romcom where our FMC mistakenly gets placed to live in an all male dorm.

I really loved the FMC and the hijinks with the side characters in this one.