Review: "I'm Not Here to Make Friends" by Andrew Yang

I'm Not Here to Make Friends by Andrew Yang
Published July 2023 by Quill Tree Books
★★★

It's a teenagers-stuck-in-a-house-together reality TV show with a twist: the cast is all Asian American. And another twist: this has always been a low-key show that is just about normal teens' lives, with none of the drama and puppet strings of other reality shows.

But yet another twist is in store: this year, the show has been bought out...and the new producers want Drama.

Parts of this I really love—almost the entire cast is Asian, which is fantastic and still unusual in YA. I love that the ultimate emphasis is on friendship rather than romance (I spend a lot of time bemoaning the YA focus on romance—I want so many more friendship stories). It's light and fluffy and summery. It also seems to be operating in an interesting gap of "almost"—could be one thing, could be another thing. (More on that in a moment.)

Another part of me wants to take Sabine by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. She's of a generation that has grown up with reality TV—it should be basically her first language. And yet she's still surprised to find that the producers will prioritize ratings over feelings, and will slice and dice footage however they see fit, and will resort to whatever underhanded ruin-your-life threats they have on hand. I think this part of things will work for a lot of readers, but it left me cringing (mostly on Sabine's behalf) for much of the book, and secondhand embarrassment isn't really something I enjoy, even about a fictional character.

I'd have liked to get to know the other characters a bit better—as it is, we have Sabine and Yoona, who spend the book locked in a will-they-won't-they place between friendship and enmity, and we learn a fair bit about them. Then there's Danny (bro), Grant (exists), Chris (would-be actor, but I guess he's locked in a closet, making out with Mari, for most of the book), and Mari (artsy, but presumably locked in a closet to make out with Chris, except when she escapes to play peacemaker and then goes back to the closet). Sabine acknowledges at the end that she didn't actually get to know most of the other players well, but...well, I just wish we'd gotten a bit more of them. More nuance, more flaws, some intersectionality.

On the "almost" gap: I read another review noting that this felt middle grade, and in retrospect I can see that too—it would take some changes (unsupervised 13-year-olds are a different challenge than unsupervised 17-year-olds, or however old they are here), but as it is it's a very clean and uncomplicated story: no drinking, no kissing, no swearing, no innuendo, etc. etc. But there's also an almost-LGBTQ story: it would take even fewer changes to turn this from a platonic friendship story to a f/f romance, which at times I genuinely thought was the direction the book was going in. (Or it could have been both MG and queer!) As it happens, that's not the case, but it does make me quite curious about the choices made during writing and revising and editing.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.