How to Convince a Boy to Kiss You by Tara Eglington

Title: How to Convince a Boy to Kiss You

Author: Tara Eglington

Genre: YA contemporary

Length: 446 pages

Published by: HarperCollins

Source: Won from HarperCollins!

Blurb:

The course of true love never did run smooth. For a girl who shares her name with a princess (a.k.a Aurora from Sleeping Beauty) Aurora Skye’s life seem fathoms away from a fairytale. Sure, she’s landed Hayden Paris, Potential Prince extraordinaire. And she got her wish — one first kiss with all the knee-trembling, butterfly-inducing gloriousness she’d hoped for.

But Aurora’s learning that a kiss is just the beginning of a story.

Instead of being the truly transcendent, utterly epic follow up it should be, her second attempt at kissing has literally landed Hayden Paris in the emergency room. If that’s not mortifying enough, the whole school is now referring to her as ‘Lethal Lips’.
Meanwhile it’s all systems go for her best friend Cassie – she and Potential Prince Scott are totally loved up and can’t stop kissing. Jelena (Jefferson High’s answer to Helen of Troy) has moved on from the heinous betrayal by Bad Boy Alex West and has unleashed her plan to rule the world by running for School Captain. Problem is Alex is running too and Jelena’s pulling out all the stops to prevent him from stealing her rightful place as ruler of Jefferson High – including offering Aurora’s Find a Prince/Princess Program as one of her campaign initiatives.

How is Aurora going to prove her program is foolproof and help Jelena win the election when her matchmaking manoeuvres seem to be throwing all the wrong people together – including the NAD and the hippy-dippy Ms Deforest — and she can’t even convince Hayden to kiss her?

This is the sequel to How to Keep a Boy from Kissing You by the same author. You can read my review here.

Again, it’s a super-cute book, but I had a niggling feeling in the first book which got more intense during this one: I don’t think I’m the right person to read it.

Let’s just get it out of the way: it’s really girly. I’m not a girly girl in any sense of the word. Or at least, not to the extremes that these girls are. They’re OBSESSED with love in a way that honestly kind of freaks me out. They were basically these girls:

Except they’re feminists – which is totally cool! I love that they’re portrayed as confident and strong as well as being feminine, because we need more girls like that. I just couldn’t relate to them very well, because I’m not that kind of girl. And I know you don’t have to be like the protagonist to like the story, but I found it a lot harder to enjoy this one compared to the first one.

I think one of the reasons is its length – about 450 pages for a contemporary, woahhh. It felt draggy in some places. I read in the acknowledgements that it was originally 160,000 words – holy MOLY, that is a long book.

Then there was Jelena. She’s kind of the co-star in this book, since she’s running for school captain and all. I didn’t like her one iota. She’s SO self-absorbed it’s kind of ridiculous.

All that said, it was a very fun story. The plot was a lot more detailed than in the first book, and it worked really well. It was lovely to see how the characters developed and how the family relationships matured.

Also, Jeffrey comes back. He’s like my favourite character ever. I laughed out loud sooo many times at the things he said. Three cheers for Jeffrey! (and petition for Tara Eglington to write a novel from his perspective).

If you like cute romance, this book is for you. If you loved How to Keep a Boy From Kissing You, you’ll probably love the sequel. There are hardly any contemporaries with sequels, so grab your chance with this one. Perfect for fans of The Princess Diaries. Or Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, which is also hilarious. Like I said, I’m not the best audience for it, but that’s no fault of the book, and I think if I was a bit more girly it would be so much easier to fall in love with it.