A clever, charming, and poignant debut novel about a girl who must decide whether to pursue her dreams or preserve her relationships, including a budding romance with her ex-best friend, when an app she created goes viral.
Ro Devereux can predict your future. Or, at least, the app she built for her senior project can.
Working with her neighbor, a retired behavioral scientist, Ro created an app called MASH, designed around the classic game Mansion Apartment Shack House, that can predict a person’s future with 93% accuracy. The app will even match users with their soul mates. Though it was only supposed to be a class project, MASH quickly takes off and gains the attention of tech investors.
Ro’s dream is to work in Silicon Valley, and she’ll do anything to prove to her new backing company—and the world—that the app works. So it’s a huge shock when the app says her soul mate is Miller, her childhood best friend with whom she had a friendship-destroying fight three years ago. Now thrust into a fake dating scenario, Ro and Miller must address the years of pain between them if either of them will have any chance of achieving their dreams.
This is such an intriguing concept! An app that can (almost definitely) predict your future based on 100 questions? Amazing! Sudden internet fame? Wonderful! Slow burn romance? Eh - not really my thing, but ok. That's a personal taste thing.
However, and this is probably also an opinion thing; the friendship-destroying fight that led to three years of silence between these one-time soulmates and literal life savers? Not that serious, I would have said. One of them is a bit of a drama queen over it. And I say this as someone who was Miller in school. (Admittedly that's :mumble: years ago now.)
Apart from that, though, I love Ro. I adore her passion and her conviction and her willingness to change her mind when presented with new evidence, and the strength of her determination to do the Right Thing. Maren is also awesome, and - although my faith was briefly shaken - Felix is great. Also I cried at a particular spot, I won't tell you where.
I know that my taste in romance is unusal, so discounting that, I really enjoyed this read. It's a great look at what passes for fame nowadays and how quickly it can turn or be used for - well, not evil exactly, but certainly nefarious purposes!
I enjoyed this and I highly recommend it to other readers.
Seven Percent of Ro Devereus publishes on the 2nd February, 2023.
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