Bye Forever, I Guess, by Jodi Meadows

Ingrid has a secret passion: curating a data feed dedicated to wrong number texts.  People seem to always be sending texts to the wrong numbers and the examples that people send to her can be hilarious.

Then one day she receives one of her own.  The sender is charming and she starts chatting with him.  When she learns that he likes to do on-line roleplaying, she invites him to join her game.  Soon enough, they are falling for each other.

What they don't initially realize (although he figures it out before she does) is that they are actually classmates.  And so a series of set ups occur where the two of them have near misses.  In the end of course all is revealed and a number of other loose ends including vanquishing a bully ensue.

It's cute and fast-paced, but it's hard to accept that Ingrid could overlook all of the clues regarding her online friend's identity.  There is also a mismatch between the characters' ages and the way they behave.  While there's a token effort to portray Ingrid's adolescent insecurity, she does a remarkable job of dispatching her tormenting ex-friend.  Her feelings for the mystery boy are strikingly level-headed (and his reciprocal feelings are equally grown up).  They simply don't sound like middle schoolers.

While We're Young, by K. L. Walther

Grace, Isa, and Everett are a three-some who have fallen apart.  But Grace hopes to bring them back together with a carefully crafted skip day in Philadelphia. Faking illness, she also manages to get Isa and Everett to join her and the three of them tour through the landmarks of the City of Brotherly Love -- climbing the Museum steps, eating South Philly cheesesteaks, hanging in Rittenhouse Square, and the sheer "joy" of driving and parking around the city.  Grace's plans get complicated by an unknown-to-her romance between Isa and Grace's brother, and the attraction of Everett to Grace.

A loving homage to Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Walther has moved the action to Philadelphia and given the main characters a gender swap, but she's also done a lot more.  I never cared for the movie as I found Bueller selfish and careless.  Grace in contrast is much more sympathetic character.  And the novel overall is a kinder story than the film.  The cost of this is the loss of the cruel humor of the original.  This is a more angsty retelling and the characters straighter.  So, while the inspiration of the novel is clear enough, it does not follow that fans of the movie will find the same things to like here.

Overall, I give this a mixed review.  I enjoyed their tour of Philadelphia.  As I said above, Grace was a kinder and more sympathetic protagonist than Ferris.  But overall, the romances were limp and lacked any spark.  For a lot of professions of love, I didn't see much at all.  And the misunderstandings that caused the kids to become divided and fed the drama were unclear and poorly explained.  I'm not really sure what all the fuss was about.

True Life in Uncanny Valley, by Deb Caletti

Eleanor is obsessed with tech titan Hugo Harrison, founder of an app that allows you to rate people and the developer of Frame, an AI program.  But she's not a tech geek.  She's the illegitimate offspring of the man.  Her Mom had a relationship with Harrison years ago and Eleanor and her older sister Ros were the result.  But Harrison no longer talks to them and Mom refuses to allow Eleanor to contact him.  So, Eleanor hatches her own plan.

With a little planning and a lot of luck, she gets herself employed as a nanny in the household, taking care of her half-brother Arlo.  It's tricky to juggle stories so that neither Harrison nor her mother find out who she is and where she is working, but she mostly works that out.  But her plan to simply get to know her father better gets complicated  when she discovers that Arlo is being exploited and abused by his father.

Being a Deb Caletti novel, there's much more to the story than that.  A short list of subplots would include: an homage to Golden Age comics, a diatribe against William Moulton Marston and Aldous Huxley, a fair smattering of childcare advice, extemporizations on German etymology, an extremely toxic family, a love interest (including one botched sex scene), and a screed against social media, robotics, and artificial intelligence.  Caletti's novels are never boring!  The overall point of all of this is the attack on artificial intelligence and the way it borrows/steals its material from artists. But I found the  repulsive mother and evil elder sister (drawn straight out of Cinderella) far more compelling.  The ending is a hot mess but it's an entertaining read.

The Song of Us, by Kate Fussner

Olivia and Eden fall in love at first sight in their middle school's poetry club.  But it's not smooth sailing.  Olivia has already come out to her parents and has a supporting family.  Eden is still struggling with her identity and has a homophobic father and sick mother.  Olivia wants to announce their relationship to the entire school, but Eden insists that it be kept a secret.

At a party, Eden tries spinning the bottle and kissing boys and when Olivia finds out, cruel recriminations ensue.  But then Olivia has regrets and tries to win Eden back. But Eden is trying to fix herself by learning how to fit in with a popular clique.  Back and forth they go, sorting out their feelings about relationships and about each other through verse and song.  And while Olivia tries to win Eden back with a grand gesture, in the end the reality is that at their age important decisions will be made by others.

A beautiful and bittersweet verse novel about first love and the sorts of mistakes we make in middle school.  I didn't see the intended retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that the blurb promised, but I didn't need to. What I found was a very sweet romance and two girls willing to fight for it.  Ofttimes creative verse is an added benefit.  Delightful!