From The Repository is a collection of my old book reviews lifted from my old website. Check out the rest here.
Title: The Way You Make Me Feel by Maurene Goo
Publication Date: May 08, 2018 by FSG Books
Synopsis
Clara Shin lives for pranks and disruption. When she takes one joke too far, her dad sentences her to a summer working on his food truck, the KoBra, alongside her uptight classmate Rose Carver. Not the carefree summer Clara had imagined. But maybe Rose isn’t so bad. Maybe the boy named Hamlet (yes, Hamlet) crushing on her is pretty cute. Maybe Clara actually feels invested in her dad’s business. What if taking this summer seriously means that Clara has to leave her old self behind?
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My thoughts
I don’t know why I keep putting off this book albeit being excited to read it. Thanks to my K-drama void and a bit of a push from a Twitter poll, I finally picked this up. And here I thought I was in for a thriller, I guess I just needed to go back to romancelandia to end this slump.
Seriously, I’ve been juggling three books at once for three weeks but kept putting them down because nothing seemed satisfying. Here goes this book and it only took me a solid five hours to finish reading! Oh, how I’ve missed this feeling!
The Way You Make Me Feel follows the story of Clara Shin, truly a rebel without a cause chick, who’s stuck working at KoBra with her arch nemesis, Rose Carver.
While this book was presented as romance, I think that the story revolved more about Clara’s relationships with the people around her and overall her journey to finding herself once more. See, Clara was having her emotions detached, and this was one of the reasons why I couldn’t put the book down. This aspect of Clara hit too close to home. For some reason, I felt like I could understand myself a little better as I got to read more of Clara’s viewpoints.
Love that goes beyond romance
Going back to relationships, I absolutely adored Clara’s relationship with her Dad. It kinda reminded me of Desi and her Appa from I Believe in A Thing Called Love, but on the other hand, their banter was more like Appa and Janet from Kim’s Convenience!
The friendship aspect was so on point. Having someone you initially hate cave in and end up your best friend is amazing, and I loved seeing Rose and Clara’s friendship flesh out. As for the romance, it was a little bummer that I didn’t see much of Hamlet other than being the love interest but he really did the romantic dork type a justice. I can’t help but grin ear to ear during his scenes in the book. He was just super adorable and please where can I get one?
Overall, it’s a given that Maurene Goo perfectly captured the complexity of relationships, especially for teens.I definitely recommend The Way You Make Me Feel! It’s a great summer read especially if you’re looking for banters, sweet romance, and most especially food! Reading this made me so hungry, thanks to the very visual description of Korean and Brazilian food!
It’s easy not to be disappointed when you’re always wading in the shallow end of feelings.
The WAY YOU MAKE ME FEEL, MAURENE GOO
Let’s Talk!
💖 Have you read this book or any of Maurene Goo’s books?
📚 What are some of your favorite books that feature food?
💖 How about books with Asian Lead Characters?
This review was first published on The Bibliophile Confessions on March 24, 2019.
