Never Kiss Your Roommate (by Philline Harm)

I was in Barnes and Noble, browsing book covers for the category of "read a book you know nothing about based solely on the cover" and, although I chose a different book for that, I did think this cover was cute and figured I'd check it out from the library.

About a third of the way in, the fanfic language and references started, and I finally looked up this book to discover the author was part of the Wattpad author program and wrote this when she was 19.  This explained a lot. On Goodreads, there is a lot of anger about the racist portrayal of one of the main characters, but I'm not going to pile on. I certainly wrote some embarrassing stuff in my own YA novels and I wrote them as an adult.   I will say that Wattpad needs a sensitivity reader because although clearly the intentions were good... let's just say this British boarding school somehow has a co-ed basketball team* so the only Black character can be a basketball star. 

(*And a cheerleading squad. The school presented here doesn't make any sense at all. This is fanfic-quality writing, for sure, for better or for worse. Once the author matures and gets a real editor, her books could well be much better.)

Why did I continue reading it? Well, for a silly reason. One of the challenges this year is, once again "Pick a challenge from any of the previous years’ challenges to repeat."  Last year, I did one of the 2015 challenges, since the two years I haven't done the RHC were 2015 and 2016.  I haven't decided which challenge I'll repeat this year, but for the books I've read for fun, I've kind of been keeping track of which 2015 categories they fit. (Some are very broad - like "read a book by someone of a different gender" - and so this is relatively easy.) Anyway, this one qualified as "a book written by someone when they were under the age of 25" and so I figured if I finished it, I could cross off another 2015 category.