Boys Like You by Juliana Stone

Boys Like You by Juliana Stone is a cute summer read with a lot of predictable and cliche elements, but still engaging enough to keep me reading. It's the story of "two broken souls... one hot summer" where two teens, Monroe and Nathan, both struggling with guilt over past tragedy, find each other in the way that pretty much only happens in YA novels.

Although romance is expected as soon as I picked up Boys Like You, I still felt like it was too sudden with the love and quite predictable and didn't have enough intensity and build it. It also felt like it was based only on physical attraction (at least at first), but the author wanted you to think it was deeper. But other than the fact that they both had dark secrets, they really didn't seem to have that much in common. That said, I really did enjoy reading Nate's perspective, while I had more difficulty connecting to Monroe, possibly because her secret was a mystery even to the reader. I think knowing what Monroe was hiding earlier would have made her more sympathetic and would have allowed for more development of what she had gone through and her recovery, as happened with Nate. Still, Monroe's secret was a bit different for a YA novel, while Nate's was more expected.

I also had an issue with the ending which was just too perfect and not at all realistic. However I ultimately did believe Nate and Monroe had a genuine connection, so even though there were a lot of difficulties with the story, there was enough there that made Boys Like You a cute and fun read overall. 

Release Date: May 6th 2014 Pages: 288  Format: ARC
Source: Publisher  Publisher: Sourcebooks  Buy It: Book Depository