Counting Down with You by Tashie Bhuiyan
Genre: YA Realistic Fiction
Blurb (on back of book): A reserved Bangladeshi teenager has twenty-eight days to make the biggest decision of her life after agreeing to fake date her school’s resident bad boy.
How do you make one month last a lifetime?
Karina Ahmed has a plan. Keep her head down, get through high school without a fuss, and follow her parents’ rules—even if it means sacrificing her dreams. When her parents go abroad to Bangladesh for four weeks, Karina expects some peace and quiet. Instead, one simple lie unravels everything.
Karina is my girlfriend.
Tutoring the school’s resident bad boy was already crossing a line. Pretending to date him? Out of the question. But Ace Clyde does everything right—he brings her coffee in the mornings, impresses her friends without trying, and even promises to buy her a dozen books (a week) if she goes along with his fake-dating facade. Though Karina agrees, she can’t help but start counting down the days until her parents come back.
T-minus twenty-eight days until everything returns to normal—but what if Karina no longer wants it to?
MY OPINION: ***
I was super excited for this book because I've heard so many amazing things about it (I feel like this is becoming a trend and not a good one for me...). I have been trying to get more into YA fiction again because I have recently been remembering how amazing life was in my YA phase. However, I've honestly decided that YA just may no longer be for me (for the most part).
I don't want to give a summary like I usually do because if we're being honest, I genuinely don't remember a lot of what happened in enough detail to do it justice. I'm just going to talk about the things I liked and then the things I didn't like and sum it all up as best as I can.
LIKES:
There was a lot of anxiety and mental health representation in this book, which I always enjoy reading about. I think the author portrayed anxiety very well and I was very interested to learn more about various anxiety techniques that can help during panic attacks or other stressful situations. Karina's anxiety also did not encompass her entire character; I never felt like it was all that mattered about her, which I find is a fatal flaw in a lot of books with mental health rep.
Karina was a strong female character, despite her weaknesses and insecurities. I completely understood how hard it was for her to fight back against her parents and their narrow-minded views while also trying to preserve their love for her. I think this is a fairly common situation for many people of color. I am not trying to generalize here at all; I personally come from an East Asian background and can definitely understand parts of what Karina was going through, if not at such a large degree.
I loved the relationship between Karina and her brother. In the beginning, they were more of the typical siblings, with fighting and arguing and teasing. However, as they began to open up to each other, I loved seeing their relationship develop and change into something much more strong and mutually beneficial for both of them. It must suck to have parents who clearly support one child over the other for whatever reason but I'm glad that Karina didn't let that inner resentment spoil her relationship with her brother.
I loved Karina's friends and how supportive they were of her. Both of them were very different from each other and didn't feel like two friends born from the same side-character cookie-cutter mold. We also got LGBTQ+ rep!
Now, I do not feel the most comfortable talking about Islam and the representation we saw in this book. I personally am not religious and I do not come from any religious background so what I know about Islam and other religions are the things I've read or been taught in school. However, I've seen a lot of complaints about the Muslim representation in this book and how it weaponized the religion, especially in Karina's relationship with a white, non-Muslim boy. Now, personally, as I read this book, I never saw any vilification of Islam. Karina constantly refers to her religion in a positive light and she definitely respects her religion and Allah. Whenever she was angry about being unable to date Ace, she doesn't refer to Islam as the problem. Instead, she chooses to blame her parents. Now that is a whole other issue in and of itself but I personally did not see any hateful words towards Islam and thought that the representation was very well-done.
I think something we have to remember in fictional books is that we are writing about fictional individuals who may not represent a specific reader in every single way. Just because a character identifies as something, it does not mean that they have to fit the exact same mold as someone else who also identifies as that thing. I think this is super important when reading books with representation of different religions, races, sexual orientations, etc etc. Instead, these people are who they are and readers do not have to find every single part of them in that character.
DISLIKES
Ace. Now, generally, I adore the male love interests in YA romances. They're always the swoonworthy, obviously unrealistic, hot, amazing men who could never exist in real life. However, while Ace was perfectly kind and treated Karina amazingly, I personally could not deal with Ace's saturated personality. WHY was he SO understanding and SO sweet and SO perfect?? Especially when he is described as a "bad boy" and has some cold, callous exterior and hates everyone. Like, I am all for nice guys, but don't describe them as bad boys and then have them be the sweetest, most sugary little boys. I didn't see the "bad boy" part of Ace at ALL except perhaps because he wore a leather jacket...
I would like to say that Ace does not play some white savior or anything like that, which I was very grateful for. I know that is a common problem in books with main characters who come from minority communities. He doesn't ever criticize her for her religion or anything like that and instead helps her work through her problems. He always respects her and her relationship with her family, even when he clearly doesn't agree with it or is hurt by her parent's rules.
The writing style wasn't my favorite. I think that was what caused me to lower my rating from a five stars to a three. I think I just don't like YA-style writing because it felt similar to other YA books I've read recently and didn't fully love. I found the book to be far too long for what it was. There was a lot that honestly could have been cut off or cut out. I said it.
I also don't like insta-love. I was expecting a slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers, forbidden-love kind of thing going on here but honestly, it veered more towards the insta-love camp than anything. Ace and Karina have a small, short, brief, tiny rocky start but then suddenly they're going out on fake dates and then falling in love in like two chapters. Eh. I'm just not a fan of the trope and I wish I had known that that was how the relationship was going to go before going in.
I also didn't really feel the chemistry between Ace and Karina. I feel like she was better without him and I didn't really feel the love and sparks and all of that between the two.
In the end, I enjoyed this book for the most part but found the romance aspect to fall a bit flat. I would recommend this book to readers looking for a cute, serious, fun YA romance with a lot of diverse representation and interesting commentary on family, love, religion, and identity.
Main Character: Karina
Sidekick(s): Ace, friends, Samir, etc
Villain(s): Misunderstandings, parent's views, etc
Realistic Fiction Elements: This book was all very real to life.
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