Meet Cute book cover.
When you first see the book or hear about Meet Cute, you may be surprised to know that it has fourteen different authors, including Jocelyn Davies, Katherine Mcgee, Nicola Yoon and Ibi Zoboi. The book consists of fourteen short stories, each about “how [two lovers] first met” because “every romance has to start somewhere.”
In a couple of these original short stories, you will find yourself as the main character, for example, the first piece of writing, Siege Etiquette by Katie Cotugno. To create this personal effect, the author uses words such as “you” and “you’re” when describing the thoughts and actions the character is making in the story. The other authors use multiple character perspectives, but you can see the distinct styles in each writing piece.
Meet Cute does not just include the standard storyline of boy meets girl, but it mixes it up with female meets female storylines and one story of a girl named Nia who is struggling at school because she is transgender. In Somewhere That’s Green, by Meredith Russo, Nia’s preference for the girls’ bathroom causes outrage, but Nia is more concerned about a girl at her school named Lexie. Despite the fact that this is a story about how two people fall in love, it tells a message that appearances are not everything. You have to dive deep to get a sense of who people really are.
Another great writing piece in Meet Cute is Click, by Katherine Mcgee. Click tells the story of two main characters, Alexa and Raden, who are matched on a dating app called Click. It may sound a little cliche or ridiculous, but the two go on a whole trip around the city to find Alexa’s phone, which she had left in a taxi. All of her life work was in a memory card she had nervously been snapping in and out. The ending is shocking but great when the two finally get to talk about something other than Alexa’s phone.
One of my personal favorites out of the fourteen stories would be The Unlikely Likelihood of Falling In Love, by Jocelyn Davies. The main character Samara is more of a logical person who is very into numbers more than anything else, including love. What are the chances of passing by somebody on a train and falling in love? What about seeing them several more times? That is exactly what Samara thinks when she passes by Demetrius, which is just a name she makes up for him, since their trains only pass by for a quick second. The author makes it an adventurous story as Samara uses this as her AP math project, in which she attempts to discover the statistical probability of seeing the same person twice on a train. The story is adventurous and humorous as Samara tries to find her statistics about Demetrious and love.
Meet Cute is a romance novel and young adult fiction novel, but I highly recommend it to anybody looking for an adventurous and funny book. I have only written about three out of fourteen short stories, all of which are based on “how they first met” with a variety of different writing styles. If this book seems interesting to you, but you don’t plan on buying it, then you can find a copy of Meet Cute at the Malden Public Library.
