Review: Emma Lord's YOU HAVE A MATCH.

Thanks to the publisher & Netgalley for the complimentary ARC. All opinions provided are my own.

Q: did you ever go to a camp? I went to a church camp once when I was a kid & got stitches on my chin after trying to show off for a boy on the see saw. He was not impressed 🥴.

I thought Emma Lord’s Tweet Cute was adorable & I couldn’t *wait* to get my hands on You Have a Match.

Featuring Abby Day, a grieving 16 year old who’s also trying to recover from the humiliation of having feelings for the best friend who doesn’t have feelings for her, You Have a Match takes it one step further on the emotional scale by having Abby learn her family’s biggest secret after taking a DNA test: she has an older, biological sister named Savvy.

Abby & Savvy make plans to get together at the same summer camp where they’ll try to figure out what happened: how their parents know each other & why they haven’t known anything about the other sister until after the test.

At camp, Abby will also try to put the Big Embarrassing Incident—when she tried to kiss her best friend Leo—behind her, a feat made more difficult by the fact that he is in fact at camp with her.

This is a heart-stirring & emotional YA contemporary that takes place in the charming locale of a summer camp. Seeing Abby make new friends while getting into hijinx, form a strong bond with her seemingly total opposite sister, figure out what’s going on with Leo, & take charge of her photographer dreams is really sweet. It just is.

My only real quibble with this one is that the situation with the parents after they find out what their kids know feels so big & I wasn’t  entirely satisfied by how it plays out on the page. Not that it wasn’t well done; I just wanted something more—especially with Savvy—because there’s so much emotion there.

Lord has a deft way of writing stories that pull me in & make me invested, & while Tweet Cute is still my number 1, You Have a Match cements Lord as one of my fave YA contemporary authors.

4.5 ⭐️. YHAM is out now.