Caitlin_D wrote a review for this one like, 24 hours after I picked it up from the library. Her review was pretty meh, but I already had the book so I figured I might as well read it. And I felt pretty meh about it, too.
“I’m ready to lose myself,
but I’m not ready to lose you.
I’m ready to find myself,
But I’m not ready for you to know what I find.”
You Know Me Well alternates between two teenage narrators: Kate, who’s about to meet a girl that she’s loved from afar for years and is terrified at the prospect; and Mark, who’s in love with his best friend — who fools around with him but won’t go beyond that. They meet up at Pride Week, when they sneak into a gay bar and recognize each other from school. The rest of the novel involves them quickly becoming BFFs, and helping each other sort through their troubled love lives — all with San Francisco and Pride Week as a background.
My feelings about this book basically came down to the same way I felt about The Unlikely Hero of 13B — I think it’s fantastic that YA has been changing to involve groups of people who have been ignored for years: kids with mental illness, kids struggling with their sexual identity, kids who aren’t struggling because they know who they are, people of color, and so forth. But that doesn’t mean that every book will be a winner, just because it tackles something newish to the scene. I think Kate and Mark’s relationship here was forced and unrealistic, and it really tainted the rest of the book — even the good bits (I did love the love for SF though — the descriptions of the city and its goings-on made it feel magical).
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