In which I read Hot Dog Girl by Jennifer Dugan
This book was in my TBR because I was expecting a cute fluffy romcom as well. It’s a romcom, and it’s kind of cute, but not really that fluffy? I’d give it a solid three stars.
The main character, Lou (Elouise), struck me as extremely annoying at first. I felt bad for her because she got stuck with the hot dog costume for the second year in a row at Magic Castle Playland, when she applied to be the princess. I felt bad for her because Magic Castle Playland was an important place for her, growing up, and it was closing down.
I felt bad for her because Nick, the guy she’d been crushing on for a long time, was dating the princess of Magic Castle Playland. But when she started to drag her best friend Seeley into a scheme to (1) break Nick up with his girlfriend and have him fall for her, and (2) keep the castle running despite the owner’s insistence that he had made up his mind? I don’t know - I guess once upon a time I used to find these things fun to read/watch, but not anymore.
These days I just got annoyed, especially when Seeley was one of the coolest characters I’ve read about lately and Lou’s scheme involved pretending she and Seeley were together which (1) doesn’t make sense, and (2) plays to the stereotype that bisexual girls only date girls to get boys’ attention? Fortunately, Seeley was cool enough that I read on, and the more I did the more I got to know Lou, who turned out to be more complex and interesting than I originally gave her credit for. And in turn, as she got to know Nick better, she began to realise that he was more complex a person than the ideal she had in her head, and that she was really in love with Seeley. Yay!
This book wasn’t quite what I expected it to be, but since it’s about how people may not be who we expect them to be, I thought that it was kinda apt.
tl;dr: This book is cute fluffy romcom, and not much else, which puts it in the “okay, fun” category for me now but I probably would’ve loved as a teen.
My copy: I received an ARC of this book from PRH International for work.