Maddy is a sixteen-year-old who likes a boy in her theater club.

Joe is cute and popular and, incredibly, sending signals that he likes her back. Or does he? Isn’t Joe going out with Gemma?

Rich has a crush on Grace, and he even sends a letter of recommendation from the pope to get her to pay attention to him. But Grace doesn’t appreciate that tactic. . . .

The problem is, in life’s messy mixed signals of friends and lies and sex and status, true love can
be hard to find. And the real thing doesn’t always come in the most obvious package, either. Is it possible that the person you never thought of that way is the one who will ultimately touch your heart?

This compelling exploration of feelings, expectations, and attraction offers a contemporary and candid look at love and sexuality while moving readers with its gentle portrayal of a very special first relationship.

Love is something that mostly everybody wants, whether they realize it or not. To be wanted by someone, knowing that somebody other then family members, cares for you and wants to be around you. In this story we meet teenagers on a search for finding love.  Maddie Fisher and Rich Ross have come to a point in their young lives where they want a steady relationship, wanting the real thing but searching in the wrong places.  Maddie is your average semi popular girl who is used to being looked over and tagged as the “friend”, she then sets her sights on one of the poplar guys in school who she feels could be the one. While Rich is more of a loner, keeping to himself and not caring about what anyone say or thinks, finds himself liking one of Maddie’s friends who is also one of the popular girls. Through their interaction with each other in their journey in finding love Rich and Maddie realize through trials and tribulations that the person they least expected, the one called friend, could be the persons they were meant to be with. I enjoyed reading this story, following Rich and Mad’s journey to finding love.  They both were easy to relate to  with all of their strengths and insecurities.

I liked the added depth with Maddie’s strained family dynamic as well as Rich. The romance was slow to bloom bit it raised the anticipation with each encounter between Rich and Mad.  Though i could understand Maddie, I felt that she was a little bit naive letting people do what they want regardless of her feelings. Though as the story progressed she became a bit more confident in herself and what she wanted to do with her life which saved the story for me. The story was well written with some plot twist to an otherwise predictable plot line. I felt sorry for Maddie’s friend but at the end of the day and all the things she did karma came back to bite her, hard. But she defiantly brought the drama to the story. What I enjoyed the most was the romance between Rich and Mad and how deeply and intense their feeling were toward each other after weeding through their crazy crushes. This turned out to be a nice romantic read that had me feeling the love.