It’s no longer tenable to imagine that the anxieties of a white heterosexual young man expelled from an expensive prep school capture the spirit of our era. The meet-cute is blackmail in the cute and witty YA contemporary where our protagonist Henri is just trying to balance life as a college-bound senior in NYC attending one of the cities most elite private schools. I look at Corinne afterward, and everything about the moment feels like a postcard: the lint caught in her pink hat, the flush of her cheeks, the way she's scanning my face and biting the inside of her cheek as if there are a million things in her head that she's trying to hold back right now.

He elicited a multitude of laughter from me with his many observations, while also appealing to my heart with some of his hopes and fears. Instalove is one of my biggest bookish pet peeves, so maybe I’ll wait and check this one out of the library instead! That story had incredible characters, spectacular humor, and lots of emotional depth, and I saw all those elements on display in Charming as a Verb as well.This book is a cute contemporary perfectly relatable for teens heading into their last year of highschool where college admission decisions and uncertainty about the future loom. The story felt like it dragged so much and I couldn’t find myself invested in any of the plotlines that the author was introducing. And maybe that was intentional, but to me it just felt like the author realized that Henri needed a passion for the story to work and stuck one in without much thought.

But I would have wanted to learn more about Henri's culture and how his Haitian culture and American culture intertwine. He’s first-generation American, the son of hard-working Haitian immigrants; he’s a good student at the prestigious FATE Academy, where he’s well-liked; and he runs a dog-walking business for upscale New Yorkers.I can see that Henri is actually a people person though, so seeing him referring his actual skills as a “hustle” really puzzles me. Ben Phillipe’s sophomore YA book tackles several themes from the immigrant experience, familial expectations, the pressure of college admission season, and finding a person with whom we can be our truest selves. In the case of his dog-walking business, I didn’t take issue with this trait because he has the necessary skills, just not the reputation and acclaim to back him up. Without reading the book, you already know that this book will be nothing but charming just by looking the cover alone. There is the stress with getting all the applications in, keeping your grades up, and padding your "resume" so that the colleges notice you.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, I just wanted this book to exceed my expectations when all it did was fulfill what I thought would happen in the first place.When his neighbor and fellow high schooler Corrine’s mother hires him to walk their dog, Corrine quickly uncovers his sham of a company. And I would have truly enjoyed if there was more added to Henri's storyline of being Haitian-American because I think that would have added a lot more backstory and culture to this novel.