When you’re sixteen, one of the hardest parts of growing up is growing up and GCSEs. At that time, you think the world is going to end, if you don’t pass those exams. Your family tell you that these exams are not important but when you think about it, it is the start of endless exams till you graduated university, if you decide to go.

Alongside GCSEs, hormones, boyfriends and girlfriends, you try to find that stage/balance, of no longer being a child but a young adult. You do adult thing or try to at least. We follow Phoebe as she takes on that year of exams and you want to concentrate, the last thing your mind is love. Everyone around you, either has a boyfriend and girlfriend – being sexually active, as that’s the “cool” thing to do. It is an odd stage in life but Wibke perfectly depicts this.

We follow Phoebe on her journey to young love. The ups and downs, mixed emotions and realisation that being in love is scary yet exhilarating at the same time. The book is written in a diary monologue and we follow Phoebe first-hand through everything.

I personally enjoyed this book – it was light and easy to read book. This book made me reflect on my teenager life. I felt connected with the characters. We’ve all been through that stage of life and it was a refreshing take on a love story!

I received an advance digital copy of this book from the author, publisher and Netgalley.co.uk.
All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

I loved this book - breezy, funny commercial fiction that gets deeper and darker every few chapters. I loved the world and the characters - it actually made me want to work in a charity shop... I laughed out loud regularly which I think is so rare. I really recommend for fans of Louise Rennison and Simon vs the Homosapiens Agenda.

*4.5 Stars*
(Thank you to my Mum for typing this for me).
Thank you to NetGalley for sending me this eARC in return for an honest review.
This book follows the main character Phoebe who thinks love is for losers and vows never to fall in love. Phoebe starts this book feeling rather abandoned due to the fact that her mother, a Dr, is going to Syria for 6 months to aid in the humanitarian crisis (something she does often) and her best friend Polly has ditched her for a boy. But through a series of unfortunate events she ends up volunteering at her God Mothers charity shop where she finds friendship and love in an unexpected place.
What I Liked:
- The writing. This story was written in a diary format which suited it perfectly. Phoebe is an authentic, sarcastic and insecure teenager and this is really emphasised by it being written as a diary. I enjoyed the fact that Phoebe showed similar characteristics to my own peers at age 15 which meant the story was really relatable.
- Phoebe. She wasn't really meant to be a likeable character, especially in the beginning, but I liked the fact she wasn't perfect or always doing the right thing. When she first met Alex, a charity shop volunteer with Downs Syndrome, she clearly had some problematic thoughts, but by the end of the book he was simply her friend the same as all her other friends. She also frequently comments on the clothing or lack there of of other girls but this comes from insecurity and I liked how this developed throughout. It was refreshing to read about a character who made mistakes but learned from them.
- Side characters. This book was made so much better by the well developed, 3 dimensional side characters. Phoebe lives with her God mother Kate who is an eccentric Scottish lady with designer cats. The volunteers at the charity shop, who ranged from the old couple she loves, the middle aged woman who hates her, and her 2 best friends Alex and Emma were all fantastic characters. Emma was also the love interest in the book and it had a well developed foundation for the relationship and it was a great slow-burn romance.
What I Didn't Like:
- The beginning. This had a slow start and it took a while to figure Phoebe out and connect with her and the range of side characters only came in after the first 50ish pages.
Overall this was a hilarious, relatable and heartwarming story. I would recommend it to anyone who is a fan of Netflix's "Sex Education" or "Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging". It was a very impressive debut.

‘What a stupid expression that is in the first place: To fall in love. Like you fall in a ditch or something. Maybe people need to look where they’re going.’

Love Is For Losers opens on New Years Day, when Phoebe Davis realises that her best friend Polly is about to replace her with new boyfriend Tristan. It’s only ever been Phoebe and Polly, friends for life; Phoebe has no idea what she’s going to do without one of the few constants in her life. With her mum working for international medical aid, currently based in Syria helping those in need, she’s now living with Kate, her mum’s best friend, again – Phoebe feels lost, a little angry and baffled at how her hopeless her best friend has become.

Told in diary format, over the course of just over half a year, Love Is For Losers makes for a fast-paced and utterly charming read. Phoebe Davis is a YA protagonist like few others. A realist who views life rather literally, she’s inadvertently charming and very much the right kind of unique. Bruggemann constructs her voice beautifully, so much so that it becomes a delight to anticipate and predict how Phoebe will react to events. She very much sounds like a real teenager (which doesn’t always happen with YA).

It’s also refreshing to read a book which depicts a growing love story in a manner absent of cliches – just like Phoebe herself. She’s a refreshing character to follow, particularly as she isn’t perfect. She regularly does the ‘wrong’ thing, can’t quite read people and can be immensely judgemental – but that’s not unusual for a 15 year old. Whilst she regularly messes up, we see her learn and grow as a character; it’s a real delight to follow this happening. I particularly like her idiosyncrasy of researching and compiling data for all manner of crises, it felt like a very believable trait that occasionally resulted in real laugh-out-loud moments.

Speaking of comedy, the ensemble cast of various eccentrics are brilliant. Bruggemann has a created such a delightful array of characters, who we quickly come to know and love.Kate, a Scottish charity shop manager with two ‘designer’ cats, in particular, is an icon in-the-making. Her wisdom, delivered at varying degrees of Scottish-ness, felt immensely believable. She’s a counter to Phoebe, warm and trusting – and their relationship is just delightful. What is also delightful is that Phoebe’s burgeoning relationship with Emma is never overwrought, it’s a beautiful love story that just happens to be about two young women. Even if one of them doesn’t immediately realise that she’s in love…

Delightful and beautiful is the best way to sum up the book overall. Told in a charming and even-handed manner, Bruggemann’s debut novel balances the heavy with the light-hearted. There’s exploration of how difficult it can be to form emotional bonds and trust others, how people can put on a front or mask to protect themselves and how anger can eat us up without us realising it. But there’s also cat escapades, bad interviews at Dream Bear Factory and over-analysing of Whatsapp messages.

Love, loss, longing and laughter – all in one fantastic read.

Don't judge a book by it's cover - BUT LOOK AT THIS COVER.  IT'S GORGEOUS and I have to admit, it certainly caught my eye and for that I can only be grateful.  I've actually found 3 different covers for the book but am only using 2 for my bookstagram picture because . . .well, I'm lazy. 
Written as a diary, we meet Phoebe, a 15 year old girl who has decided that love turns people into idiots.  Take Polly, for example.  Until very recently, she has been Phoebe's best friend, but now she has a boyfriend  and now  he's  all that Polly can talk about. 
Phoebe is a great character. She's stroppy, sarcastic but so gloriously honest about things even though at times she really ought to think before speaking . . but she's 15 so give her a break. 
Phoebe has reasons for being so prickly and keeping others at arms length which we learn about but also see Phoebe mature a lot and widen her social scene.   The supporting characters are all well developed and love them or hate them, they all bring something to the story.  
I found the entire book to be refreshing.  I applaud the author for including certain subjects and normalising them.  At the end of the day, this is the diary of a young girl and the way that she lives her life and I bloody loved it.

Love Is for Losers is not quite what expected this book to be.

Phoebe is a fifteen-years-old about to take her GCSE, with a mother always traveling in war zones to give medical support; a dead father of whom she has no knowledge or interest about; and a best friend who, in her opinion, replaced her for a boyfriend.

My main concern with this story was to find another self-absorbed teenager, of whom tantrums were validated through the plot because she was "different and special". Phoebe believes she's different and does not always act in the best possible way (hey, that's what humans are: we aren't making good choices all the time), but the narrative never indulges her bad choices, and openly criticized her behavior. The plot deals with one of the main challenges of that age (and, to be fair, how *any* age), that is starting to think outside your own mind; understanding other people's emotions and, above this, understand that not everything can be explained with logic.

However pleasant the main protagonist was, the prose style threw me off the book from time to time. At the start, I wasn't sure I could read the whole thing; after 20%, I decided that I liked it, although sometimes it was difficult to keep reading when three or four chapters in a row were only dialogue and play-like descriptions, such as:

Kate (insert description of her actions in those brackets): "Dialogue"
Phoebe (same as above): "Dialogue".

Bonus points for good representation: none of the characters was lazily written (and by this, I mean written as they were not real people or like they did not have any life or attribute or personality that was not subdued in their sexual orientation, disability, age etc.) or did not have its unique voice.

'Love is For Losers' follows fifteen year old Phoebe, as her life is changed when her best friend gets a boyfriend.

With the GCSE's looming closer every day, and a mother that is constantly away, Phoebe finds herself working in a charity shop where she befriends Emma and Alex. From there, her life shifts to a series of questions and thoughts on the future.

I thought that the book was hard to get into at first. I felt that Phoebe's growth throughout the book was well done but I'm upset it ended so suddenly!

This book was somewhat of a mixed bag. There were things I liked about it, but there were also plenty of things I didn’t like about it.

Love is for Losers is written as six months worth of diary entries from the main character as she lives with her godmother, gets through her GCSEs, and falls in love while her mother is away on a humanitarian mission.

I think it’s fair to say that far and away the biggest reason for me not liking this book was Phoebe. She’s a dislikeable character, but there’s dislikeable yet you still like them, then there’s dislikeable because they say all sorts of crap and are never pulled up on it in the narrative. Within the first 10% or so, she’s been awful about humanitarian work and a character with Downs syndrome. And yet, she’s all like “I’m not a hypocrite like the rest of you because I say exactly what I’m thinking”. Well, sometimes I really wish you wouldn’t, Phoebe. But, despite disliking her (and I know she’s only 15, but c’mon), I continued. She never really got better, but she grew on me in some perverse way. I almost liked her, up until she reminded me how awful she was by making fun of someone having a panic attack.

But she wasn’t wholly horrible, and that sort of made it more disappointing, if anything. I liked her relationship with Emma, and also the found family aspect of everyone working at the charity shop. I think, though, what the book really needed was Phoebe to be challenged (to say the least) on some of her shit, and to actually show evidence of developing from it.

Because it had some promising aspects! The relationship among the charity shop workers and how they formed a little found family, for one. Even though Phoebe pretended to hate them (we get it, you’re not a people person), the way they visibly grew on her throughout the book felt organic. And the book let her use the word lesbian, multiple times! So the groundwork was there, it was just a shame Phoebe, the misanthropic edgelord, was the way she was. (Listen, she may be 15, but I don’t take that as an excuse. You can not be a little shit at 15.)

I don’t think anybody actually really knows me. Alright, Adam Parrish.

I always thought there were two types of book which allowed for social commentary on absentee parents, broken friendships, and the prospect of new romance. Those that allowed characters to breathe, reflect and learn. And those that rush through the narrative at breakneck speed.

Somehow, Love is for Losers does both. 

The day by day structure allows the reader the plough through the narrative, whilst creating an image of isolation and abandonment. Phoebe is not a happy teenager. Her mum has prioritised her calling as a 'doctor without borders', her best friend has replaced her with Tristan (the new boyfriend who can't ride a bicycle (I don't really get why this is such a big thing for Phoebe)), and she has to get the bus to school. 

The style of writing feels like it has been stripped directly from my teenage journals, and it all feels very 'Adrian Mole' and 'Bridget Jones'. Everything is perfectly curated to remind you how rubbish it is being a hormonal teenager. 

One criticism I had was the slander against the Lush staff. I will not have the peppy people at Lush besmirched. They're smothered in a scented fog for hours at a time, washing people's hands and getting covered in glitter. If you think they're intense, it's because they've not smelled unperfumed air for days, and they're busy trying to provide products that don't hurt the planet. Cut them some slack. 

Overall this is a contemporary, docile teen drama that doesn't isolate New Adult or more mature readers. The voices are authentic, if a little pessimistic. It has a convincing narrative and a protagonist with agency. And you can't overlook the importance of representation included and the friendly and stylised design of the page. I've enjoyed it.

Thank you Netgalley for an ARC of this novel.

I thought this was such a hilarious book. Phoebe is so relatable and the text is so easy to read (which I always find is a plus). I think the plot is great and the writing style (diary format, essentially) with the hashtags as titles was such a good move as what teenager doesn't love that? They're also such a good way to create intrigue for the reading! I found it so hard to put the book down as well because of the chapter lengths. Oftentimes I will put a book down if I feel a chapter is too long but in this case they were almost too short!

I really enjoyed the humour in this book. it was so straightforward and blunt and so my cup of tea. The relationships between the characters are brilliant and I could just so imagine being friends with a Phoebe.

Love is for Losers is a young adult novel about a girl who thinks love turns people into idiots, until she finds herself entranced by the girl at her godmother's charity shop. Phoebe is fifteen, about to do her GCSEs, and dealing with the fact her best friend has a new boyfriend and her mum is abroad working as a doctor. She lives with her godmother and her godmother's designer cats, but an accident means she agrees to volunteer at her godmother's charity shop, where she meets Emma. Phoebe hates everyone, but she doesn't hate Emma, and she's not sure what to do about it.

The novel feels like a merging of older YA lit (particularly in terms of the diary-like style and humour) and newer YA's characters and messages, and it is done well to create a funny, touching story about not only love, but also loss and being more aware of other people. Phoebe is a good flawed character whose disdain for most things and sense that she knows everything can clash with other people, but who is a good person too. Her slow realisation that it isn't love she dislikes, but how she sees it (and, implicitly, how the heteronormative culture around her has only given her one way of seeing love) is important, and the ending is sweet without being too saccharine.

It is good to have YA that feels like a follow on from older British YA, but with a same sex love story that isn't really focused on the fact they're both girls as much as the fact one of them thinks she won't fall in love with anyone. It's the sort of book I wish was around when I was a young teenager to show that people's stories aren't all the same even in a kind of romcom YA context.