Book review: Femme by Mette Bach

Academics have never been Sofie's strong point; she s too busy spending all of her free time with her boyfriend, Paul, the captain of her Surrey high school's soccer team. When her English teacher implements a new program that pairs her with straight-A student Clea, Sofie worries about how Paul will react to her hanging out with the only out lesbian at school. Sofie is as surprised as Paul at how close she and Clea quickly become.

When Sofie discovers that Clea is planning a road trip to check out some American colleges over the winter break, she invites herself along, causing more issues with Paul. But it's only after a college student asks if Sofie identifies as a "femme" lesbian that she starts to question her own sexuality and her relationship with both Clea and Paul.

This book was received from Netgalley in return for an honest review.

Femme isn’t all that impressive.  I finished it in a single day, but that’s only because it was so short.  I’ve never read a book in this series, but looking at other reviews, there are a lot of them saying they don’t expect much from it, and I feel like this isn’t an exception.  There’s too much going on and it’s glossed right over within a half a page to a page.  The entire climax of the book is resolved in a page when they get into the school and Sophie’s friend is like “Oh it’s over.” It’s some buildup for a resolution that isn’t satisfying at all.

There’s also a lot of stereotypes.  The entire book focuses on it, in fact.  You have Clea the butch lesbian, Sophie the ‘femme’ lesbian, the stereotypical mean girls.  There’s a talk with Sophie’s teacher about how you shouldn’t be afraid of labels because they can help you know who you are and blah, blah, blah, but it doesn’t really stick with the reader.

Not to mention this book falls into the category of ‘adult who thinks they know how to use teen slang when they really, really don’t.’  It’s painful to read some of this stuff.

The only reason I gave it two stars on Goodreads instead of one is because I did manage to finish reading it without feeling the need to toss my Kindle across the room, so at least there’s that.  But it goes into the increasing pile of ‘coming out stories that I wouldn’t recommend.’