punk. The book doesn't say, but that was presumably under the Park Chung-hee dictatorship, where you could get into serious trouble for sporting overlong hair or t-shirts with English sayings. Rock music was actually banned. Anyway, they fell in love. Her parents sent her to university in the US to separate them. He worked as a mechanic to save up money to follow her. Then he moved in with her in the US. Her parents found out and shunned her. He kept working to pay her tuition. Eventually she became a neurosurgeon and they got married and her parents finally came around. And a few years later she DIES. Oh my god. [In Korea, she was a rich, pretty girl, top of her class, and he was a working-class. The book doesn't say, but that was presumably under the Park Chung-hee dictatorship, where you could get into serious trouble for sporting overlong hair or t-shirts with English sayings. Rock music was actually banned. Anyway, they fell in love. Her parents sent her to university in the US to separate them. He worked as a mechanic to save up money to follow her. Then he moved in with her in the US. Her parents found out and shunned her. He kept working to pay her tuition. Eventually she became a neurosurgeon and they got married and her parents finally came around. And a few years later she DIES. Oh my god. (hide spoiler)

Let me start with what I liked about this book:- The writing style was VERY Princess Diaries, very fun and snappy. I really did laugh reading this book, at least in the beginning.- The relationship between the main character, Desi Lee, and her father. It. Was. THE. Cutest. I would have liked more space for them in the book.- The love story between Desi's parents. (view spoiler) THAT I would have liked a whole book about. Every time their story was brought up I thought "Why am I not reading a book about that instead?", which is not really a good sign for the main story I guess.Which brings us to... the things I didn't like. Which turn out to be the main character, the love interest, and the plot lmao.- Desi Lee needs a psychologist more than she needs a boyfriend. Her personality was kind of a mesh between Paris from Gilmore Girls (the Chilton years) and Mia from The Princess Diaries. With a liberal dose of crazy all her own. Seriously, she is beyond. She has a K-drama based list of "steps" to fall in love, which is a cute rom-com premise, except that her list involved almost killing the guy she was crushing on.. She is incapable of remorse. She is one of those scary "ANYTHING is fair in love and war" people. Newsflash, baby. Not everything is fair in war. Which is why we have the Hague and Geneva Conventions and the International Criminal Court. And not everything is fair in love either. For example, orchestrating car crashes to get closer to your crush.Here's a sample of her twisted thinking:girlcreepy.. It's creepy to climb through a girl's window unannounced to watch her sleep. And it's creepy to spread nails on a road to make your crush crash his car!Sidenote, this is the second YA book I've read where a main character uses faux-feminism to justify her sociopathic behaviour. (The other one was The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart).- I didn't like the love interest, Luca Drakos. Some of it is because he just isn't my type (he wears a beanie everywhere, all the time - ew). But some of it is because he's a big whiny overprivileged emo baby? He is someone who would also benefit from a psychologist. Or from military academy.He is pretty terrible to his perfectly nice dad, who saved his ass from going to jail not once but TWICE. The guy is just trying to make sure his son doesn't go down a bad path, but Luca can only complain about how his dad has so much money and connections. Cry me a river! He even whines about how his dad invented a life-saving medical equipment because it would make him money and not because he actually wanted to save lives. Who gives a shit? Go read some Adam Smith, you horse's ass. (Turns out his dad - a medical engineer - did care about saving lives. Little Lenin wouldn't know because he isn't actually interested enough in what his father does to even know WHAT it was that he invented).I ended up liking Luca's dad wayyyy more than I did Luca. I totally agreed with him that Luca needed more discipline. Too bad we don't actually see him apply that to Luca (he was never really punished for anything, ever?).- Other things: 1) The instalove. 2) Desi makes a CRAZY sacrifice for her boyfriend, basically throwing her entire life's dream in the trash for a guy she's known like, a couple of months? And it turned out to be over a damn silly thing. I don't know what kind of message that is for girls. 3) Desi never gets the come-uppance she deserves after manipulating the hell out of Luca, which weirdly vindicates her crazy list. It worked after all!Anyway, this book was a mindfuck, especially towards the last third. If you like some of the more outlandish K-dramas, like Boys Over Flowers (which was totally BONKERS), you might actually like this? But if you are into er, healthy relationships, maybe skip it.["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>