Review: "Oh My Affogato!" by Daphne Ang and Donna Ghorbanpoor

Oh My Affogato! by Daphne Ang and Donna Ghorbanpoor
Published May 2026 via Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
★★★

It's the summer after high school, and Soraya is ready for the rest of her life to begin—starting with a grand tour of Europe with her best friends. And if it just so happens that she's planned the trip to start where her totally not toxic ex, Wes, is hanging with his frat boy bros, well, she can't help coincidence, right? And if they're going to be in the same place anyway, now is obviously the time to secretly get back together...

Now. I read this because even in my relative dotage I cannot resist a fluffy YA travel story. And fluff this is; Soraya is bound and determined to spend as much as her time as possible getting a sunburn on the beach and drinking cocktails and swooning over boys, and as little time as possible doing anything involving history or local culture. If I had met Soraya in high school, we would not have been friends. We would have been perfectly cordial to each other, and probably gotten along fine for small talk, but she's the sort of person to think that someone decked head to toe in expensive brand names looks "effortlessly cool", while I am the sort of person to think that such a look is both stunningly unoriginal and the opposite of effortless. She would quietly dismiss me as an uncool nerd (this is accurate); I would quietly dismiss her as being a boy-crazy birdbrain; we would both be happy; and after graduation we would never speak again.

So that's where I found myself with Soraya: disappointed that she prioritizes a boy over her friendships and that her peak travel dreams involve doing the exact same things she can do at home (with a boy who jerks her around just as much in Italy as he did in Georgia). This latter point is not a character flaw (and nor is it meant to be), it's just that for wanderlust reads I prefer a bit more adventurousness. And these are learning points for Soraya, of course; she figures some things out for herself over the course of the book, and one is left with the impression that when she returns to the States for college she will at least do so with a bit more curiosity about the world. But...I'm also sort of left with the impression that if she couldn't switch over from a toxic boy to a nontoxic boy, she'd still have a bad case of the Wes Nile Virus (which, to give the book its credit, is excellent wordplay) by the time she went home.

With all that said: It's a fun and quick read. I did not click with Soraya, but I did read the entire book in one day and still have time to finish off another book at the gym. I'm not sure who exactly the target reader is (there's a bit too much spice to aim this at younger teens, but not a ton of depth either, so...I suppose older teens who just want something really light). There's some casual diversity, which is nice; also nice is that Soraya and her friends are on careful budgets and have no intention of blowing those budgets. It looks like this might be the first of several books, with the next one potentially taking place in France, and even years (decades!) out of my teens, I'll take whatever light travel books this series can throw at me.

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