This review was originally published on my blog on September 27th, 2020.

Book Synopsis:

Meet Pepper, swim team captain, chronic overachiever, and all-around perfectionist. Her family may be falling apart, but their massive fast-food chain is booming ― mainly thanks to Pepper, who is barely managing to juggle real life while secretly running Big League Burger’s massive Twitter account.

Enter Jack, class clown and constant thorn in Pepper’s side. When he isn’t trying to duck out of his obscenely popular twin’s shadow, he’s busy working in his family’s deli. His relationship with the business that holds his future might be love/hate, but when Big League Burger steals his grandma’s iconic grilled cheese recipe, he’ll do whatever it takes to take them down, one tweet at a time.

All’s fair in love and cheese ― that is, until Pepper and Jack’s spat turns into a viral Twitter war. Little do they know, while they’re publicly duking it out with snarky memes and retweet battles, they’re also falling for each other in real life ― on an anonymous chat app Jack built.

As their relationship deepens and their online shenanigans escalate ― people on the internet are shipping them?? ― their battle gets more and more personal, until even these two rivals can’t ignore they were destined for the most unexpected, awkward, all-the-feels romance that neither of them expected.

My Review:

4-4.5/5 stars. It was such a cute romance and a pretty interesting story. The two main characters had so much chemistry and I loved them together. All the side characters were fun, too. The plot was pretty crazy at times with miscommunication being the root of a lot of problems. The ending was slightly underwhelming but still really good.

This book’s plot is similar to another book I’ve read called What I Like About You, where the main girl and guy are chatting online while also falling in love in real life, but this book has much more to it than just that storyline. Both books also happen to involve a lot of baking though, which is a funny coincidence.

Like I said in the first paragraph, I loved the romance. Jack and Pepper (PepperJack, how cute but cheesy is that) have so much chemistry and such good banter. They play off of each other so well and their conversations never feel forced. Their romance is very slow-burn and there were a few almost-kisses that made me scream “just get together already!” in my head.

I really related to the character of Pepper. She’s a total overachiever and perfectionist who’s always involved in something and strives for perfect grades. Sometimes I would read a sentence where Pepper talked about her school habits that was so true for me. I didn’t relate to Jack as much, since I’m definitely not the class clown, except for the fact that he’s into coding and web/app development, just like me.

The plot was a little frustrating at times, just because of the lack of communication. A lot of the problems that arose could’ve been solved pretty easily if two characters just talked to each other, but it made sense that someone might not want to talk to another person based on the situations the characters were in.

The dual perspectives of the chapters made the story more interesting because you got to know both sides of the story. Instead of being from just one person’s point of view and thinking that another character was horrible for doing what they did, you got to know why they did that and the whole situation.

Something I thought the author did a great job of, though, was the whole online side of things. Twitter and the internet was obviously a huge part of the book, and you can tell the author understands the way people are on the internet today. It wasn’t cringy or totally inaccurate, it was very realistic to the way things are today with Twitter wars, how fast memes spread, people being creepy and deep-diving into people’s personal lives, etc.

Like I said, though, I thought the ending was a little underwhelming. It was almost like things were wrapped up too nicely that it was unrealistic. Some of the reasons for conflicts being resolved didn’t make much sense. A book with a great ending will leave me feeling either warm and nice or so excited and anxious for what’s to come in a sequel, depending on the type of book, basically feeling like “wow, that was a great book”. This book’s ending just left me feeling “eh, it was pretty good.”

Check out all of my reviews on my blog: https://lyrat16.wixsite.com/read-it-and-reap