The Best Laid Plans

I hope everybody is doing well staying inside and social distancing. Recently I requested The Best Laid Plans by Cameron Lund from my library, and they kindly bought it. If you’re looking for a sweet end-of-high school story about first loves, this might be the story for you.

It’s Keely’s 18th birthday, and she’s having a horrible time. Her best friend, Andrew, is having a party–and the last of her friends has lost her virginity. Keely feels all alone and inexperienced. Are things going to be worse when she’s in college?

Then, she meets a cute boy that looks like James Dean, and he seems to like her. Only now Keely has an even bigger problem. Her friends are telling her that he’s not going to like her if he finds out that she’s a virgin. So she hatches a plan. Ask her best friend Andrew, who’d never hurt her, to help her gain experience. After all, he always seems to be with a different girl.

The Characters

The characters in The Best Laid Plans seem realistic. Keely, the main character, is insecure about her experience with boys and has ideas of how she needs to behave in order to keep the boy she wants. Her girlfriends think they’re experts on relationships, but like a lot of high school girls, they aren’t. Andrew is a sweet boy and–some of the boys in the school are a little crude. But aren’t they in real life? Dean also seems like a lot of college boys that might find themselves interested in high school seniors without really developing a friendship first.

The Story

Over the course of the story, Keely realizes what she really wants. Her high school friends are involved in a little drama, and we realize at the end of the story what the cause of the drama is all about. I thought the story was great and tied up nicely at the end.

Controversy?

Some readers may or may not find the book controversial, especially if they don’t finish the book. There are things that are revealed at the end of the book that clarify the meaning of the book. For one, everybody seems to be sex-crazed. Seems is probably the best word for it, because we’re seeing this through Keely’s eyes, and this is something she’s anxious about. It’s something her circle of friends seems to care about. Are there people in her school that aren’t? Probably, but since the book is from Keely’s perspective, we don’t see that.

The other controversy in this book is that one of the characters is being slut-shamed. The book doesn’t condone that happening. By the end of the book, we find out who is doing it and why. Not all of the people in this book are nice. Some people in this book are pigs. But isn’t that reality? Especially in high school?

Conclusion

Overall, I thought the book was good. Perhaps not everybody is going to agree with Keely’s choices, and Keely’s view of the world may be skewed, but I think that makes it a realistic first-person POV book. The ending was sweet and slightly surprising–obviously since this book is categorized as a romantic comedy we know there’s going to be a happily-ever-after (or at least, for now), but I really enjoyed the lessons Keely learned and how things ended up turning out. If you’re looking for a sweet, best-friends-to-lovers book to take your mind off the news, I recommend it.