On paper, college dropout Pablo Rind doesn’t have a whole lot going for him. His graveyard shift at a twenty-four-hour deli in Brooklyn is a struggle. Plus, he’s up to his eyeballs in credit card debt. Never mind the state of his student loans.
Pop juggernaut Leanna Smart has enough social media followers to populate whole continents. The brand is unstoppable. She graduated from child stardom to become an international icon, and her adult life is a queasy blur of private planes, step-and-repeats, aspirational hotel rooms, and strangers screaming for her just to notice them.
When Leanna and Pablo meet at 5:00 a.m. at the bodega in the dead of winter, it’s absurd to think they’d be A Thing. But as they discover who they are, who they want to be, and how to defy the deafening expectations of everyone else, Lee and Pab turn to each other. Which, of course, is when things get properly complicated.
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Pablo Rind’s actual first name is Pablo Neruda, but he’s not Latinx (he is South Korean/Pakistani), and that’s just one of the things that confuses him about his life. He has dropped out of NYU, has more debt than he can contemplate, and is working at a bodega. He isn’t proud of any of these things but feels helpless to change them, or to even tell his parents the magnitude of his issues. Things look up, however, when pop star Leanna Smart drops into the bodega one very early morning. Pablo is quickly pulled into the whirlwind that is Leanna’s life and learns that the brand she has created is a lot more complicated than he could see on her social media. Choi pulls from themes in her previous book, Emergency Contact, and has created a compelling and quirky tale of love and negotiating early adulthood in New York City. There are discussions of mental illness, racial and cultural identity, and social media woven in with romance and the story of Pablo trying to figure out what he wants and how to get there. This has mature content and is written for an older audience than many current YA titles. Recommended for purchase by libraries serving older teens and new adults, or where Emergency Contact circulates highly.