Review: What Boys Really Want by Pete Hautman

Rating (Out of 5): ~3

Publisher: Scholastic

Spoilers?: No.

Goodreads Synopsis:

 National Book Award winning author Pete Hautman lets us in on the secret.

Lita is the writer. Adam is the entrepreneur. They are JUST FRIENDS.

So Adam would never sell copies of a self-help book before he'd even written it. And Lita would never try to break up Adam's relationship with Blair, the skankiest girl at school. They'd never sabotage their friends Emily and Dennis. Lita would never date a guy related to a girl she can't stand. They'd never steal each other's blog posts. And Adam would never end up in a fist fight with Lita's boyfriend. Nope, never.

Adam and Lita might never agree on what happened, but in this hilarious story from Pete Hautman, they manage to give the world a little more insight into what boys and girls are really looking for.

Review:

I was surprised by some of the things in this book, in a good and bad way. I liked it alright, but it wasn’t quite as good as I was hoping, in some ways.

This book is about two friends, who have known each other forever, and how one of them decides to write a book about what boys really want, while the other has a blog snarkily answering questions related to boys and girls, mostly.

It’s told in alternating point of views, for which I was glad, because otherwise it might have only been in Lita’s head. And I wasn’t a big fan of Lita. She could have been really enjoyable, too, what with having a blog and how her answers were always very entertaining. But instead she was almost always angsty and moody and it got kind of annoying. It might be because I’m not a moody person, especially not aloud, and how she was upset about things for no, or little to no, reason, all the time.

Adam, on the other hand, I really enjoyed. He’s pretty much a dumb, clueless, teenage boy, but I still really enjoyed him. He was kind of sweet, and he was trying, and it wasn’t really his fault that he was so dumb about how publishing works and why Lita was always mad at him.

The ending is probably my favorite part of the book. Adam was an idiot through most of the book, and Lita was moody, but they both met some pretty sweet special someones, and I wasn’t expecting how the relationships between them turned out. It wasn’t a typical, boy and girl are friends forever and so of course love each other, even though there were several hints to that that weren’t cleared up. Either way, it was actually a pretty good ending.

This was not as good as I was hoping, but I enjoyed it enough, and do plan to read another of Hautman’s books.