True Love and Other Impossible Odds
Christina Li
Pitched as Nina LaCour meets The Half of It, the story follows a first-year college student Grace Tang who invents a class algorithm that pairs people with their perfect romantic campus match, only to have everything thrown into question as she explores questions of love, identity, and her past. Inventing a formula to predict people's perfect partners doesn't equate to love in this contemporary YA novel that New York Times bestsellers Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick call "honest, raw, and breathtakingly real." College freshman Grace Tang never meant to rewrite the rules of love. She came to college to move on from a grief-stricken senior year and to start anew. So she follows a predictable routine: Attend class, study, go home and visit her dad every weekend. She doesn't leave any room in her life for outliers or anomalies. Then, Grace comes up with an algorithm for her statistics class to pair students with their perfect romantic partners. Though some people are skeptical, like Julia, Grace's prickly coworker, Grace is confident that her program will take all the drama out of relationships. That's why she keeps trying to make things work with her match, a guy named Jamie. But as the semester goes on and she grows closer to Julia, Grace starts to question who she's really attracted to. In award-winning author Christina Li's YA debut, Grace will have to make a choice between the tidy equations she knows will protect her from heartbreak or the possibility that true love doesn't follow any formula
Publication Year: 2024
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2024 reads: 326/250
content warnings: death of parent due to terminal illness, homophobia
grace tang is a freshman who wanted college to be a fresh start after the grief of senior year. she—or rather, her algorithm—suddenly rises to fame, promising students on campus to find their perfect matches. while there’s plenty of skepticism going around, grace is confident in her algorithm…so confident, she’s determined to make things work with her match. she’ll feel a spark eventually, right? but as she gets closer to her coworker, she begins to question who she’s really attracted to.
this book caught my eye because i looove women in stem, so i loved the fact that grace built something so incredible (though it didn’t go quite as planned)! while this book did have romantic elements, i would consider it more of a contemporary novel. this book did a great job of showing parental expectations vs. your own dreams, grief, and coming-of-age. i loved how grace worked on her relationship with her father throughout this book while also trying to figure out her own identity. this was balanced so well and the depiction was, in my opinion, realistic.
i really enjoyed this book, and i’m excited to read more from christina li!
0In the worst of times, my heart yearns for stories like these. Grace's story made me smile and swoon and ache, and then it wrapped me up in the warm hug I didn't realize I needed. This book is a reminder that love and joy can be found in the most unexpected places, and that there is no pain or tragedy that precludes us from finding our way to the happy ending.
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