Tweet Cute is the lighthearted, fast-paced, pop-culture infused story of how two high school students, Pepper and Jack, eventually find their way to love. Pepper is an overachiever, a perfectionist, and quite lonely. She struggles to balance her real life as a high schooler in a competitive prep school and secretly running the Twitter account of her family’s huge fast-food chain, Big League Burger. Jack is the class clown, a constant annoyance to Pepper, and he has a secret of his own – he is the creator behind the school’s popular anonymous chat app, Weazel. The story begins with Jack’s discovery that Big League Burger’s new recipe is an exact copy of his family’s signature recipe at their small deli, Girl Cheesing. His retaliation tweet goes viral, and the two teenagers, behind the profiles of their respective businesses, engage in a vicious Twitter war. They are publicly attacking each other while simultaneously flirting and falling in love through Jack’s app. As the story progresses, their feud grows more and more personal. What happens when their (multiple) online personas dissolve? Their romance is awkward, genuine, filled with miscommunications, and so so sweet. While the book is cute and sassy, there are also many heavier layers within the characters’ lives. Both characters face so much outside pressure: Pepper is struggling to hold everything in her life together – her family (with her parents divorced and her sister not speaking to her mom), their business’s reputation, and her perfect academic record, among others; Jack is trying to step out of the shadow of his “perfect” identical twin brother and save his family’s deli from bankruptcy while also attempting to escape from the expectation that this same deli will be his entire future. The story alternates between Pepper and Jack’s points of view, and I particularly loved watching them outwit each other online and experience precious moments in real life.
This book brings to light all of the masks we don in this digital age, their consequences, and their effects on real life. Although this is Emma Lord’s first book, it is incredibly well-written, charming, and the characters are so entertaining. Tweet Cute is a perfect witty, wholesome romance, and it is also a story of family, friendship, and finding your own way.
Audrey S.