Pepper is all about her senior year. She’s on top of her grades and captain of the swim team. She has a baking blog with her sister, who’s off at college, and she helps her mother as she works to take the family restaurant, Big League Burgers, international. Pepper’s secret power for the corporation? She’s a Twitter genius, able to come up with the perfect amount of snark and smarts for popular tweets. And if that’s not enough to take up her time, she’s also been chatting anonymously online with one of the guys from school through an app called Weazel.
Jack has always felt like he lived in the shadow of his twin brother Ethan. While Ethan is the popular one at school, with the better grades, the captain of the dive team, Jack felt like he’s always had to go behind and clean up after him. Like with the dive team. Ethan is supposed to be working with Pepper on the pool schedule for the swim and dive teams, but he’s left it all in Jack’s hands. Now Jack has to take care of that on top of helping in the family restaurant, Girl Cheesing. Plus he has his senior year classes, college applications, and he’s chatting with a girl from class in the Weazel app. And for him, that’s a little more complicated, as he was the one who created it.
Weazel was supposed to allow the kids at school a chance to talk about classes in the Hallway Chat, and they could go into a private chat room with someone and talk anonymously. Each user is given an animal nickname to start, and as the private chat goes on, at some random moment, the actual identity of the person you have been chatting with is revealed. Weazel has already created new friendships in real life, and Jack takes watching over it seriously. He makes sure that the Hallway chats are respectful and that the comments never get out of hand. The only thing he does to interfere with the process of the app is to disable the identity reveal for himself (“Wolf”) and the person he’s been chatting with (“Bluebird”), because he’s just not yet ready to be revealed.
But things start to heat up for Jack and his family when it’s revealed that Big League Burger has decided to add grilled cheese sandwiches to their menu, and that their new recipe is eerily similar to the special grilled cheese that his family serves at their restaurant. So when Big League Burger starts to tweet about their new sandwich, Jack takes it personally and tweets back under the Girl Cheesing account. Thus starts the Twitter war between Big League Burger and Girl Cheesing that takes the whole internet by storm.
As the stress of the Twitter war, senior year classes, sports, hobbies, and especially family increases, both Pepper and Jack find themselves turning to their anonymous chats on Weazel to help relieve their stress, find someone who’s genuinely on their sides, and remember how to laugh. But when their secret Weazel relationships start to interfere with what’s happening in real life, they both have to make some choices about who they want to be and how they want to tell the others in their lives about their decisions.
Tweet Cute is everything I could have ever wanted in a ya rom com. It was smart and thoughtful as well as funny and adorable. These characters are wonderful, so dimensional and real, that I wish I could have had friends like that back when I was in high school. The plotting is clever and emotional and feels so genuine that it could be happening to someone right now. I’m not someone who reads a lot of YA, but I will never by choice miss another book by Emma Lord. She is fantastic and this debut novel is the perfect tasty treat for anyone who loves a well-written romantic comedy with lots of fun, intelligence, and heart. I literally would not change a single word of this story, it is so perfect.
Galleys for Tweet Cute were provided by Wednesday Books through a Goodreads giveaway, with many thanks.
