I am on a hunt, my friends! I'm on the teen blogger team for Barnes & Noble, and I have been tasked with finding my favorite YA books of 2016. (By the way, you should check out our latest post here! *end shameless self-promotion*) I already have 4 favorites so far -- Phantom Limbs, The Serpent King, We Are the Ants, and Highly Illogical Behavior -- but I want to see if I can come up with some more favorites that are not "moving contemporaries that involve teenage guys overcoming their obstacles and realizing that they are the masters of their future", because literally all 4 books are the exact same type. Not that they're not totally amazing, because they are! But I've embarked on an adventure to read all the most-anticipated and most-hyped 2016 releases that I can get my hands on, and that adventure starts with Girl Against the Universe. 
 But, if you haven't already guessed, Stokes kinda let me down here. I was looking for what my friends had told me was the best thing they'd read in 2016, but I just got yet another cheesy, YA contemporary romance. Nothing offensive, but nothing extraordinary either. We have your standard "I'm-not-good-enough-and-I-have-no-friends" girl, except she comes with some unnamed mental illnesses now! How exciting! And there's also the "hot-and-perfect-with-a-troubled-life" guy, the "supportive-and-has-no-interests-other-than-the-heroine" best friend, and even two "are-they-a-thing?" girls! Damn, these authors are really shaking things up around here. 
 Honestly, this book wasn't bad though. Although I will be the first one to admit that it's cliched as hell, it still manages to be charming and humorous and everything a contemporary should be. And its depiction of mental illness and therapy was honest and true, from what I know about that. (Trust me, I know way too much about that stuff.) Just ... I wish romances wouldn't have an HEA sometimes. I wish they'd take a dark turn and end up somewhere no reader would have expected it to go. Blame my overly-emo, black soul for this, but I wish that would happen just once. (This is giving me ideas for my own book ... *laughs evilly*)