READING: Only Mostly Devastated by Sophie Gonzales

Publication date: March 5 2020

Published by: Hachette Children's Group Australia 

Genre: MM, YA, High school, Contemporary, Romance, Bullying, 

Rating:

When Ollie meets Will over the summer break, he thinks he's found his Happily Ever After. But once summer's ended, Will stops texting him back, and Ollie finds himself short of his fairy-tale ending.

A family emergency sees Ollie uprooted and enrolled at a new school across the country - Will's school - and Ollie finds that the sweet, affectionate and comfortably queer guy he knew from summer isn't the same one attending Collinswood High. This Will is a class clown, a basketball jock and, well, a bit of a jerk.

Ollie has no intention of pining after a guy who clearly isn't ready for a relationship. But as school life throws them together more and more frequently, from music class to the lunch table, Ollie finds his resolve weakening.

With the noisy drama of their friends as the backdrop - from ambitious Juliette and frosty Lara, to big-hearted Darnell and king-jock Matt - Ollie has a decision to make.

The last time he gave Will his heart, Will handed it back to him trampled and battered. Ollie would have to be an idiot to trust him with it again. Right?

I received an ARC of Only Mostly Devastated from Hatchette Australia and these are my thoughts.

I loved Grease as a kid. I knew the lyrics to all the songs and I used to sing along every chance I got. And for a non native speaker, trust me, it was an ordeal to learn all these lyrics! 

As I grew older, it stopped appealing to me as much and that is why I decided to pass on Only, Mostly Devastating. Until it arrived on my doorstep and I felt like I just had to give it a chance.
The first 70 pages or so were great and I was really absorbed in it, I couldn’t put it down. Ollie was just a bit too intense for my taste, too angsty. He was coming across way younger than a senior in high school but only when it had to do with his romantic life. He acted way more mature in his relationship with his parents and the very serious role he had to play during a family crisis. I felt like that was the biggest contradiction in the book because while I didn’t much care for the romance part of it all which I found quite frivolous – a bummer for a book marketed as a YA romance – I was genuinely touched by the way Ollie’s life outside of school was written. There were a couple of pages where Ollie was thinking about the inanity of death and I could really relate with and feel for him. I was actually nodding my head because those were exactly my thoughts on this! But then he would go to school and everything would change, he became like this completely different person. 

I didn’t really care for Will. I didn’t like the way he was behaving around Ollie for his friends’ benefit even though he absolutely didn’t have to be so over the top anti gay.
Which is way his big romantic gesture in the end was so out of the blue and basically not convincing at all. I didn’t buy Will’s sudden change and I never really got the chemistry between him and Ollie. 
The other characters were more caricatures than real people you can relate to. Over the top reactions that are just not believable at all.

Overall, while Only Mostly Devasted is by no means a bad book, since it is tackling such a major issue like inclusivity, tolerance and acceptance, I would have liked it to be a more realistic depiction of the romantic life of a 17 year old gay kid in the South, rather than an over romanticised, utopic version of it. Just change your target audience to pre teens and you’ll be golden. As it is, I believe older kids will find it silly.