THE ONLY THING WORSE THAN ME IS YOU

Teens Beatrice and Benedict find surprise love in this Much Ado About Nothing retelling.

Trixie Watson and Ben West have been feuding for 10 years—ever since Ben pushed Trixie off the monkey bars. Though the pair seems content to hate each other for life, their friends don’t want to spend senior year enduring their verbal sparring. They set the pair up to believe each has been in love with the other for years, à la Shakespeare’s original. While all of the main characters (save one) are adorably geeky (as well as mostly white), though she's generally likable, protagonist Trixie can be downright cruel, a characteristic that may make her hard for some readers to connect to. The characters attend a “school for geniuses,” which makes the fact that the trash talk Trixie and Ben throw at each other is so impressively academic and geeky believable—not to mention immensely satisfying for those who get the references. When Trixie’s best friend, Harper, is accused of masterminding their school’s technology-based hacks (a great update to the Shakespearean plot), Trixie is determined to prove her innocence, but it’s Trixie’s and Ben’s adorably sweet evolving feelings for each other that’s the core of this story.

Though it doesn’t do anything new, it does what it does well, with the nerdy and geeky references adding originality: good fun.