You Can Go Your Own Way (by Eric Smith)

In hindsight I'm really not sure why I kept reading this; I think because of the very delightful pinball arcade setting? But the pacing of this book is truly insane. Here's the blurb:

"A heartwarming and thoughtful enemies-to-lovers rom-com about two teens—one trying to save his family's failing pinball arcade, the other working for her tech genius dad who wants to take it over—who get trapped together in a snowstorm."

They do get trapped together in a snowstorm. Except it doesn't happen until about 70% into the book, when they have already solved their major conflict. They are trapped for, generously, three pages.  But then all these huge developments happen at the end (their big conflict, which is at like 90%) and is immediately solved with a time jump that makes it feel like multiple chapters are missing.

The writing of the "girls" makes it obvious that a man wrote this book. The characters are flat and feel like cardboard stand-ins. (Nick, in particular.) The chapters alternate POVs but the voice of each character is exactly the same (they both refer to people as "standing about" multiple times, which is awkward). The cultural references are all Gen X. Dear YA authors: you can't keep dropping these sentences - e.g., "like that old movie my mom likes, called Clueless" - throughout an entire book.

Anyway, sorry to that author, this was not a winner.