Some family secrets aren’t meant to be kept. Hiding evidence about your daughter from your other children for 17 years is definitely one of them.
Such is the plot of “You Have A Match,” Emma Lord’s newest contemporary young adult (YA) novel following the success of 2020’s “Tweet Cute.” The novel, published on Jan. 12, chronicles one summer in the life of 16-year-old Abby Day, a reckless adventurer who always has her camera around her neck and her heart on her sleeve. When Abby discovers that she has an older sister named Savannah, the curated truths she has built her life on collapse like a flimsy house of cards . In the aftermath of this revelation, Abby must find new ways to relate to her parents, her new “#Fitstagrammer” sister and her best-friend-turned-crush, Leo. “You Have A Match” contains all the perfect ingredients for a fluffy YA novel: a whirlwind of family drama, an awkward, unrequited crush and a convenient existential crisis. Yet Lord’s novel also feels like the literary equivalent of the saccharine Starbucks drinks that its target teenage audience consumes — it provides sweetness along with the sinking suspicion that it’s too sugary to be good for you.
Certain aspects of “You Have A Match” contain surprising shades of depth for a young adult novel. Lord delicately paints a portrait of grief as Abby grapples both with the death of her grandfather, Poppy, and with the fear that she is fundamentally not good enough (and what Emory student, after receiving anything below an A, cannot relate?). The novel’s protagonist, however, is far from the mature, reflective character I expected she would be. Abby Day is simply clueless about how to handle her emotions, flitting from one toxic coping mechanism to the next until readers become dizzy. Her inner monologue veers from child-like descriptions of dogs and food in one sentence to profanity in the next. Lord’s inconsistent characterization gives readers a slippery view of her protagonist, causing them to alter their mental image of Abby Day with every new page.
Perhaps Abby’s portrayal strikes me as distorted because my parents treated even the mildest swear word as a scandal. Or maybe I dislike Abby because I cannot relate to her anymore. I thought that I would identify with Lord’s protagonist because I too was once a teenager named Abby who fell in love with summer camp, grieved the loss of a grandparent and had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. The aversion I felt toward Abby may not be attributable to her — it may simply be the result of my natural growing out of the young adult genre and realizing that I no longer see the world the way I did when I was 16, even if I still feel like a teenager while living with my parents during the pandemic.
Beyond its protagonist, I felt disconnected from the novel because of its plot’s cloying inevitability. I love when the book I’m reading is unpredictable, but when an author lines up plot twists like a row of dominos, the novel becomes a series of conveniences rather than surprises. Lord easily solves conflict between Abby and Savannah’s families by placing them in an overcrowded restaurant with only one available table, or causing them to fall into a ditch without hope of rescue. Most notable (and irritating) is Lord’s decision to tie her novel up with a big red bow through a “one year later” epilogue, which portrays a utopian, idyllic resolution to every single problem the characters faced in the last 300 pages. On the one hand, Lord’s conclusion was satisfying to read, and offered a heartwarming form of escapism from the current state of the world. Yet during a time where the disappearance of the coronavirus will be unable to eclipse its two million deaths or its creation of national division, the effortless ending feels a little too saccharine.
“You Have A Match” teeters on the fine line between endearing and excessive. Lord’s novel is the perfect pick-me-up to distract ourselves from the headlines, or just from the woes of growing up. However, it also comes across as predictable and unrelatable because of its numerous cliches. Or, it might be because we are in the college transition period between childhood and adulthood, where we rarely find our perfect foil in any protagonist we read about.
