Review – Call it What you Want by Brigid Kemmerer
Title: Call it What you Want
Author: Brigid Kemmerer
Publisher: Bloomsbury YA
Release Date: June 25, 2019
Page Numbers: 384
Star Rating: 
When his dad is caught embezzling funds from half the town, Rob goes from popular lacrosse player to social pariah. Even worse, his father’s failed suicide attempt leaves Rob and his mother responsible for his care.
Everyone thinks of Maegan as a typical overachiever, but she has a secret of her own after the pressure got to her last year. And when her sister comes home from college pregnant, keeping it from her parents might be more than she can handle.
When Rob and Maegan are paired together for a calculus project, they’re both reluctant to let anyone through the walls they’ve built. But when Maegan learns of Rob’s plan to fix the damage caused by his father, it could ruin more than their fragile new friendship…
This captivating, heartfelt novel asks the question: Is it okay to do something wrong for the right reasons?
I love Brigid Kemmerer’s books. Even though this is technically only the second book I have read of hers, she is already an auto-buy author.
Before I fully go into my thoughts of this book I will say that I had very high expectations of this book after absolutely loving Letters to the Lost, and I do think that might have set me up for a small disappointment as I didn’t have such a strong love for this book compared to that one. Don’t get me wrong I still clearly enjoyed this book by my 4 star rating but it wasn’t on the same level.
Brigid Kemmerer is a Queen of Contemporary. Throughout this book I was laughing and crying with the two main characters, Rob and Meagan and finding myself entrenched with the moral of the story.
Call it what you want follows the lives of two teenagers as they navigate the cruel world that can be high school while dealing with their own home-life issues. Rob used to be the King of the school and popular jock, until his best mates father reported his dad for embezzlement but before he was sentenced he tried to kill himself. The gun however slipped and left Rob’s father in a paralysed and brain damaged state. Meagan has always grown up in the shadow of her superstar lacrosse playing older sister and resorted to cheating on the SAT test causing everyone’s results being voided. However, if that wasn’t bad enough her sister comes home pregnant and Meagan is sworn to hiding the identity of the father from her family.
Brigid Kemmerer can write amazing complicated situations for her characters and exploring the different ways in which people deal with their life situations. Not every decision the characters make is right but as the reader you have been caught up in everything that is going on in Rob and Meagan’s life that you understand why they have made the decisions they have. Agree with them or not, the point I felt Brigid making was that as the reader you can fully understand why the decisions were made, and that anyone in the same or similar position might make the same ones.
My only issue with this book was that I was far more interested in Rob than I was Meagan. To me, Rob’s storyline was more interesting and he was the one battling the morals around right and wrong more so than Meagan. Meagan unfortunately wasn’t even the second storyline that I was interested in, as I was interested in Meagan’s sister, Sam. Yes, I understand growing up in the shadow of someone else and trying to be perfect can be very difficult but I just didn’t think it compared to what Rob or even Sam very going through.
Unfortunately I had a busy day when I picked this book up otherwise I would have demolished it in one sitting and I stayed up until 3am finishing it as I could not put it down.
This book is perfect for anyone that loves contemporary YA books and if you haven’t read anything by Brigid Kemmerer you should change that now.
Date Started: Nov 1, 2019
Date Finished: Nov 3, 2019
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