E-galley Review: Asking for a Friend by Kara H.L. Chen

I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Asking for a Friend by Kara H.L. Chen
Published by Quill Tree Books on July 23, 2024
Genres: YA Contemporary Romance
Pages: 336
Source: the publisher
Format: E-galley
My Rating:
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Blurb:

Juliana Zhao is positive about two things: she’s the world’s foremost expert on love, and she’s going to win the coveted Asian Americans in Business Competition.

That all changes when she is suddenly dropped by her partner and must pair up with her frustrating frenemy, Garrett Tsai. Their dating advice column has to win because Juliana’s family’s reputation is on the line within her small Taiwanese American community.

Arguing with Garrett on how to solve everyone else’s love problems and facing failure leads Juliana to see that prestige may not be everything. And with the competition heating up, she’s going to have to reckon with the sacrifices she’s made to be the perfect daughter and if winning is even her goal anymore.

My Review

I always enjoy a good competition YA romance, as well as the whole grumpy-sunshine trope being one of my favorites. I also enjoy the cultural stories like this one. It was easy to feel for Juliana and how she felt she had to do what her mom wanted her to do. Not only was there the usual Asian family pressure to be winning at everything, but the whole contest itself had been founded by her own father, who had passed away, and now she felt she had to win because of that.

But also Juliana had the pressure of knowing that her older sister had been kind of kicked out of the family or disowned by her mother for getting pregnant and dropping out of medical school. As the middle child she also felt the pressure to do what she could to help her younger sister not have to face the pressure as much. However that meant she would kind of get on her sister to try to get her to do what their mother asked as well.

The boy she ends up on the project with, Garrett, is someone she has a history with. She’d thought at camp when they were younger, that they’d really connected. But something had happened on the last day, and he’d told her he didn’t want to be her friend anymore. So going to him to get his help with this was a big leap of faith for her. Unfortunately Juliana still let her mother’s biases get in between the two, because she didn’t tell her mom she was working with Garrett. She lied about who she was working with.

In the end there is more to this competition than what it seems. Juliana also gets to know more about the people in the community that her mother doesn’t consider “their people” the more she spends time with Garrett at the community center and gets to know those people. She learns things about her father she didn’t know because of the competition, things that look bad for him, but may not be the more she thinks about it. And she of course will learn why Garrett turned away from her all those years ago.

I really enjoyed this one, couldn’t put it down, sped right through it once I picked it up. Can’t wait to purchase it for my school library so my students can enjoy it as well!

About the Author

Kara H.L. Chen grew up near Cleveland, Ohio, where she once had to shovel snow off her car with a plastic trashcan. She now lives on the West Coast with her husband and daughters, and is learning how to use an Instapot. She has undergraduate degrees in English and economics, a J.D., and a MFA in fiction. She has used her economics degree exactly once, when she tried to make a joke about marginal costs and marginal returns. It did not go well.