School Library Journal Review
Gr 8-11-Best friends since kindergarten, Adam and Lita are now high school juniors. While Lita anonymously runs a sassy advice blog as "Miz Fitz," Adam hatches a plan to write a book about how boys and girls really think. With more advance orders from girls than guys, he decides to cater to his buying audience by focusing on what boys really want. He uses Lita's blog as his main source for research, borrowing liberally from his friend without realizing it. Aspiring author Lita grows envious of Adam's literary pursuits, so she turns her attention to helping her other BFF, Emily, lure mutual pal Dennis's attention away from new girl Blair. The plot thickens when Emily warms up to Adam, and Lita falls for a university student whom she spies getting into a car with. Blair. As a supporting character observes, "You just never know who will hook up" (though the hook-ups are G-rated and sexual references are mild). Things come to a boil when Adam throws himself a book publication party, and Lita discovers that he's plagiarized her blog. The book moves along at a snappy pace, with chapters alternating between the main characters' points of view. Chapters open with Miz Fitz's advice or excerpts from Adam's book; these humorous snippets ring true. The novel's tone may remind readers of the snarky but sweet movie Easy A, or Don Calame's equally funny Beat the Band (Candlewick, 2010). This is fresh, realistic YA fiction at its best.-Amy Pickett, Ridley High School, Folsom, PA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hautman (The Big Crunch) demonstrates the gulf between male and female perspectives by alternating between the first-person narratives of high school juniors Adam and Lita, whose friendship is put through the wringer thanks to miscommunication, jealousy, and plagiarism. When Adam decides to write a book about what boys want and how they think, it drives a wedge between him and Lita, with Lita annoyed that Adam is trampling on her dream of becoming a writer (the very idea that he write an advice book was hers to begin with). But Adam discovers that writing a book is harder than he thought, so he ends up stealing content from the Web, including Lita's snarky, anonymous dating-advice blog. When Adam self-publishes his book, their conflict explodes. Hautman captures the angst, awkwardness, and joy of crushes and first dates with humor and heart, as Adam, Lita, and their friends fumble their way into relationships. Despite Adam's overall haplessness, he gets one thing right: "Nearly all problems between the sexes can be boiled down to one thing: mistaken assumptions." Hautman proves this to be true again and again. Ages 13-18. Agent: Flannery Literary. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Prickly Lita and mild-mannered doofus Adam, both juniors, are good friends, or at least they were until Adam unthinkingly tromped onto Lita's literary turf. An aspiring novelist, Lita also secretly writes a relationship advice blog under the pseudonym Miz Fitz. "You could wear a burka, but a more elegant solution might be to threaten to remove his eyeballs with your fingernails" is the typically snarky way Miz Fitz answers "Ogled," a girl hoping to get a guy to stop staring at her. Hautman begins each chapter with an entertaining Ann Landers- style exchange, though, later, some of the answers come from the advice book Adam is writing -- the one blatantly imitating Miz Fitz. The one making Lita so mad. Though the evocation of teen life is somewhat dated -- Adam hands out paper flyers to publicize his book instead of spreading the word online -- Hautman presents, by shifting between Lita and Adam's points of view, a frank, funny account of the battle of the sexes, high-school edition. christine m. heppermann(c) Copyright 2012. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
(Fiction. 13-17)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Where Hautman's The Big Crunch (2011) was an aching and soulful romance, this is the flip side: fun, sarcastic, blundering, preposterous, but every bit still a romance. The story is told in the alternating perspectives of two 16-year-old longtime friends, the optimistic, fun-loving Adam and the whip-smart but judgmental Lita. Though Lita dreams of becoming a writer, her romance novel has stalled, and she kills time as the infamous power blogger Miz Fitz, who anonymously doles out caustic advice to legions of readers. Adam, meanwhile, stumbles upon an idea to write a straight-talk self-help book for high-school girls, What Boys Want, which borrows liberally from the Miz Fitz site but who would ever notice, right? True, it's not the most original setup, but Hautman writes fearlessly from both male and female perspectives with little care about what's politically correct, and he admirably resists the urge to bring Adam and Lita together as lovers. From the always reliable Hautman, this romance delivers predictable pleasures.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist
