This book had me at ‘Gay Grease…’

Only Mostly Devastated follows Ollie after he finds out that he’s moving to the town nearby his summer fling. Excited at first to meet again, Ollie quickly sees that Will is not only deeply closeted but ready to pretend they’ve never met, carrying on as a boys-boy basketball star. 

Usually, when a book promises to be anything similar to such a well-known reference like Grease it fails to deliver, but I caught myself singing ‘Summer Lovin’’ and ‘Look at me I’m Sandra Dee’ in my head as I read some of the beginning chapters. 

You won’t find leather jackets and greased hair in this book, but you will find letterman jackets and rose necklaces. You won’t find big dance numbers and nonsense lyrics (you mean to say, going together like “rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong” is romantic…?), but you will find a band. And, spoiler alert, there are no flying cards to end this novel. Instead, you’ll get a more modern idea of friendships and romances, lgbtq+ rep, and a much cooler version of Sandra Dee in Ollie. In fact, the more you get into the story, the less and less like Grease it becomes and more and more like its own wonderful thing. 

This book is filled to the brim with classic romantic comedy troupes and can’t be said to be anything less than predictable as it follows a tried-and-true YA-romance structure…but it’s still so enjoyable. What made it, for me, was the somewhat Simon-esque (from Homo-Sapiens Agenda) narration: sarcastic, snappy, and often self-deprecating. An easy and enjoyable way of reading the story as it unfolds that made me not only like Ollie almost immediately, but quickly helped me get attached to the other characters. 

In fact, I would have liked more time in Ollie’s head. This book is slightly short, not that it feels rushed, but that there could have been more moments throughout and more time spent on building everything up. In particular, I would have liked more flashback scenes between Ollie and Will which would have provided more romantic relief to the conflicts at hand and shown us how Will acted before, especially at the beginning of the story which was where they could have been most useful. The story could have (and perhaps should have) started at the end of the summer, with a scene between Ollie and Will, that would have better lead us to understand how different Will is acting when we later meet him at school. 

I rated Only Mostly Devastated 4 out of 5 stars. Fans of Simon Vs. the Homo-Sapiens Agenda will likely love this.

Thank you to Netgalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Wednesday Books for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.