Book Review: Who’s That Girl by Blair Thornburgh

 Publisher’s description

This laugh-out-loud debut is filled with hilarious awkward encounters, a supportive LGBTQ organization, and too many cheesy lyrics to count—all with the compulsive readability of Audrey, Wait! and Boy Meets Boy.

Junior Nattie McCullough has always been that under-the-radar straight girl who hangs out in the cafeteria with her gay-straight alliance friends. She’s never been the girl that gets the guy, let alone the girl that gets a hit song named after her.

But when last summer’s crush, smoking-hot musician Sebastian Delacroix—who has recently hit the mainstream big-time—returns home to play a local show, that’s just what she gets. He and his band, the Young Lungs, have written a chart-topping single—“Natalie”—which instantly makes Nattie second guess everything she thought about their awkward non-kiss at that June pool party. That it was horrific. That it meant nothing. That Sebastian never gave her another thought.

To help keep her mind off of Sebastian and his maybe-about-her, maybe-not-about-her song, Nattie throws herself into planning the school’s LGBTQIA dance. That proves problematic, too, when Nattie begins to develop feelings for her good friend Zach. With the song getting major airplay and her once-normal life starting to resemble the cover of a gossip magazine, Nattie is determined to figure out once and for all if her brief moment with Sebastian was the stuff love songs are made of—or just a one-hit wonder.

Amanda’s thoughts

The publisher’s description up there gives a pretty thorough summary of the plot, but doesn’t really at all capture how utterly charming and compulsively readable this story is. Nattie and her friends are awesome. Her parents are great. The romantic tension (and denial/ignorance of romantic feelings) is pitch perfect. Nattie makes mistakes and bad choices and is unable to see things that appear totally obvious to the reader, but I mean those things in all the best ways; I say those things to mean that she is such a real character, flawed in realistic ways, learning and making realizations just like we all do. Adult me reads about Sebastian and rolls her eyes and thinks, girl, don’t waste time having a crush on him. But teen me is always around, and she’s like, but he wrote a song about her! Eek!

Thornburgh writes great dialogue and memorable characters. There’s great humor, banter, and clever little quips. And while this story is about romance, or the potential for romance, sure, it’s really about friendship. This review is short not because I didn’t like the book–I loved it–but because you just need to go read it and discover the excellence for yourself. Pretty much a perfect read, super satisfying and completely absorbing. 

Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Edelweiss

ISBN-13: 9780062447777

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Publication date: 07/11/2017

Filed under: Book Reviews