The Perfect Guy Doesn’t Exist

• Author: Sophie Gonzales 
• Genre: YA Romance
• Publication Date: March 26, 2024
• Publisher: Wednesday Books

Thank you to NetGalley and Wednesday Books for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

DNF @ 51%.

A fanfic writer brings her favorite TV character to life in this friends-to-enemies-to-lovers novel full of humor and heart.

Ivy Winslow has the house to herself for a week while her parents are away. She’s planning to use this newfound freedom to binge-watch her favorite fantasy TV show, H-MAD, and hang out with her best friend, Henry. She’ll also have to avoid her former best friend-turned enemy (and neighbor), Mack. But things quickly go awry when Ivy wakes up to find Weston, the gorgeous, very fictional main character of H-MAD in her bedroom, claiming to be her soul mate.

Ivy realizes that her fanfic writing has somehow brought Weston as she’s imagined him to life. But it turns out that the tropes she swoons over in her stories are slightly less romantic in reality, and her not-so-fictional crush is causing some real-world problems. To figure out why Weston is here and what to do with him, Ivy decides to team up with Henry and (against her better judgment) Mack. But with Mack back in her life, Ivy starts to wonder if Weston, her “perfect guy”, is the one who’s truly perfect for her . . . or if that was someone else all along.

I’m always on the hunt for more romance that features queer young people, especially bisexual nerds who like to write, since it makes me think about what life could have been like if I had grown up in an decade when being out of the closet was not only safer, but socially acceptable. I was also looking forward to this book after loving Never Ever Getting Back Together by the same author. 

Although both books were written by the same author, there was a very different feel to both books, party because of the personalities of the characters involved, partly because of the way the characters in this book read much younger than the characters in NEGBT, and in the believability of the storylines—while NEGBT was highly unlikely to occur, it theoretically *could* still be within the realm of possibility, yet this one incorporated elements of magical realism that couldn’t actually happen in the real world without significant bending of the space-time continuum or a flux capacitor or something equally sciency sounding. 

My biggest problem connecting to the book had absolutely no issue with the book itself. This is really best described as one of those books that just wasn’t a good fit for me personally. And if I was really pressed to find any solid reasons to explain why? There are two that pop into my head, and even after I think about them, which I’ve done for two days straight, they don’t change.

Reason number one is the one that was the blatantly obvious one for me—I was stressing and trying to distract myself from an upcoming surgery with a lighthearted read, yet my stressors were too big to be distracted from with a read this lighthearted. And the second reason is one that I’ve been trying not to admit to myself. It’s almost like admitting it, even if I’m only thinking it inside my head, but I’ve been fighting against saying that I might finally be outgrowing YA books. Hold on…let me rephrase that. YA books aren’t something that there is an age limit on, so I’m not outgrowing them per se, but rather they aren’t appealing to me as much lately.

Overall, this seems like a fun, lighthearted rom-com featuring a bisexual teenage girl who specializes in writing fanfic of her favorite fantasy TV show, but when the (fictional) main character of the show wakes up in her room assuring her that he’s her soul mate, she quickly realizes what most of us already know—the things we love and find romantic in books are not only *not* romantic in the real world, they’re actually pretty creepy. But don’t let my DNF experience with this one discourage you from giving it a read—it might just be the fluffy YA romance you’ve been waiting for! It might even be the perfect read for me too…as long as I wait until I’m more relaxed before trying it a second time, which is why I chose not to rate it for now.

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