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May. 26th, 2020 06:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOne of my favorite things about Technically, You Started It is that the heroine is a fan of kdramas, because the book and premise itself are really charmingly kdram-esque: our hero and heroine are classmates who are falling in love over text message, but because there happen to be two boys in the class (cousins) named Martin Nathaniel Munroe II, and Martin-Nathaniel-Munroe-II-who-is-our-hero has been laboring under a profound misapprehension about which Martin Nathaniel Munroe II his new friend Haley would consider "the good one," they are now trapped in a mistaken identity vortex!
The book is told entirely through Haley and Martin's text message chain -- a fun albeit technically challenging trick, as the book has to very carefully navigate its way through the point where the reader has enough clues to figure out what's happening while Haley, who has the exact same textual information as the reader but does not have the advantage of having read the front jacket copy, does not catch on. (Martin, meanwhile, figures it out far ahead of Haley, and immediately makes the classic Rom Com Mistaken Identity Shenanigans tactical blunder of 'what if, first, I got her to dislike the-one-she-doesn't-know-is-me less? No way this could backfire on me!')
Technical tricks aside, the modern epistolary is a great medium through which to tell an ace-spectrum romance (which this explicitly is). It's really enjoyable to see a relationship unfold one hundred percent through actual conversations between two people, some of which advance the plot, but most of which are just kids who have spent a lot of time in that awful high school phase where you just try your best to talk like all the other high schoolers learning how to talk like themselves through the safe semi-anonymity of a text-only friendship and getting a real kick out of it! It reminded me a lot of some of the IM-only friendships I had in high school, and how they helped me to internalize the idea that I was actually an interesting enough person for someone else to want to talk to. (And obviously this was significant for me because now, as you all know, I can't shut up.)
Relatedly, one of my favorite things about the book is the way that, by the end, working their way into being genuine with each other also lets our protagonists re-learn how to be friends with some of their actual pre-existing friends that they've forgotten how to trust with their actual personalities in all the stress of being a teenager. It's extremely cute!
The book is told entirely through Haley and Martin's text message chain -- a fun albeit technically challenging trick, as the book has to very carefully navigate its way through the point where the reader has enough clues to figure out what's happening while Haley, who has the exact same textual information as the reader but does not have the advantage of having read the front jacket copy, does not catch on. (Martin, meanwhile, figures it out far ahead of Haley, and immediately makes the classic Rom Com Mistaken Identity Shenanigans tactical blunder of 'what if, first, I got her to dislike the-one-she-doesn't-know-is-me less? No way this could backfire on me!')
Technical tricks aside, the modern epistolary is a great medium through which to tell an ace-spectrum romance (which this explicitly is). It's really enjoyable to see a relationship unfold one hundred percent through actual conversations between two people, some of which advance the plot, but most of which are just kids who have spent a lot of time in that awful high school phase where you just try your best to talk like all the other high schoolers learning how to talk like themselves through the safe semi-anonymity of a text-only friendship and getting a real kick out of it! It reminded me a lot of some of the IM-only friendships I had in high school, and how they helped me to internalize the idea that I was actually an interesting enough person for someone else to want to talk to. (And obviously this was significant for me because now, as you all know, I can't shut up.)
Relatedly, one of my favorite things about the book is the way that, by the end, working their way into being genuine with each other also lets our protagonists re-learn how to be friends with some of their actual pre-existing friends that they've forgotten how to trust with their actual personalities in all the stress of being a teenager. It's extremely cute!
