This book was cute and funny at times, but also a little predictable and the bickering between the characters was a little frustrating. As a half-Filipina, I was very excited for a half-Filipina protagonist in Bea/Beatrice/Trixie, and I liked her relationship with her Filipina mom, who is constantly trying to date and asks her to call her by her first name so that she's not seen as a "mom" by her potential future husbands. It's unfortunate that Bea is pretty annoying, because I so wanted to like her but she made it tough sometimes. Meanwhile, Bea has two best friends, Spencer, an artist, and Gabe, a budding journalist, who all sit together at lunch and try to survive being teased and bullied in school for their interests and lack of social skills. This year, Bea thinks, will be different as she's starting off the school year with a boyfriend, Jesse, who wears a beanie all the time, that's his main distinguishing feature. 
 The initial plot of the book, which is Bea, who is a math whiz dreaming of being accepted to MIT, designing a mathematical formula to have her and her friends accepted by the popular kids and thus survive their senior year in peace. Her plan works for Spencer and Gabe, but Bea's plans come crashing down when new girl Toile "steals" Bea's boyfriend Jesse using her "manic pixie dream girl" wiles. MPDG is definitely a problematic label and I'm pretty sure the journalist who coined the term in a review of the film Elizabethtown totally regrets it now. It's kind of like the term Mary Sue in that it gets abused and applied to female characters left and right in pop culture criticism. But Bea doesn't seem to know what any movies or tv shows are so she readily figures out the MPDG formula to adopt and win back Jesse. For some reason. Jesse the walking beanie. He's so boring he literally tries to date girls with personalities in order to leech some of it for himself. 
 Overall, I think this book could have done more with this premise. Instead, it kind of reinforces the stereotypes that the characters are struggling with and doesn't do much to dispute the MPDG trope. This might be because the characters are all in high school and have yet to take a women's studies course in college so their views on the male gaze aren't really fully formed yet. Either way, this book would make a very cute high school guilty pleasure movie in the vein of She's All That.