You just needed a plan, to take action. ItaEUR(tm)s how I convinced my dad to let me raise geese in our backyard, how I saved our underfunded middle school library from closure, how I overcame a fear of heights by bungee jumping on my sixteenth birthday (with only a little pee escaping me), and how I became number one in my class year after year. I believed, and still believe, that you can build your dreams brick by brick. That you can accomplish anything with persistence. 
 Even falling in love. 
 This is the Asian-American YA book the world needs. I hate to say it but god it was so adorbs, and the spunky heroine even won me, a hard-core romance cynic over. The only thing that would have boosted it to 5 stars in my eyes: an Asian romance interest. Come on :\ can't the Asian guy ever be the main love interest for once? 
 So a bit about me: I'm a 30-something grown ass Asian woman who still loves k-pop. I started off with j-pop and anime, graduated to Taiwanese dramas and music, then switched over to Korean dramas and manhwas and music and here I am. I've never been a huge fan of Asian dramas, to be honest. I watched a few that I liked, like Full House (not to be confused with the American version lololol) but the Korean drama, Meteor Garden, but I found the overwhelming majority of Korean dramas to be annoying as shit. The MC in the book describes it perfectly. 
 Or how huge obstacles were brought on by class differences, and how it was considered kind of okay for a rich mom to start hitting a grown woman for daring to date her son despite being poor. And the grown woman would just sit there and take it because the rich mom was her elder! 
 Then there were the emotions. My God, I have never witnessed this level of emotion from human beings, on-screen or off. So. Many. Tears. So much yelling. 
 The spunky, screeching, shrill, annoyingly positive main character against overwhelming odds never interested me. Like fuck that shit. Real life ain't like that. I'm sick of your fucking chaebol asshole alpha males who fall in luuuuuuuuuuurve too. I feel like you've watched one, you've watched them all, and I honestly can't stand them. The only one I can maybe watch these days is Descendants of the Sun and that's mainly because I don't give a shit about the storyline because I can stare at Song Joong Ki's face the entire time. HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNG HOW CAN A MAN BE THAT BEAUTIFUL IT'S JUST NOT FUCKING FAIR LIKE DOES HE EVEN HAVE PORES IN HIS FACE? I can only watch it for like 5 minutes at a time over my sister's back as she watches it mainly because - I'm embarrassed to even have to type this - but I just can't stare at him for too long. It's like looking into the sun. 
 This was my fear about reading this book, the main character sounds like one of the perfect ones in the dramas. Positive and smart and so cute and adorkably clumsy. I don't like k-dramas, but I know people who love them, and I understand their feelings, because fuck, who am I to judge, I who fangirl over EXO. 
 K dramas bottled up swoony true love in addictive ten-to-twenty-hour packages. My reactions to chaste first kisses were akin to heart attacks. I bawled with abandon when couples had to break up, when one of them was suffering. I sighed happily with glazed eyes when my characters finally got their happy endings. 
 The MC in this book is a tough little cookie. Her mother died when she was just seven, and thanks to a little questionably self-experiment in which she kinda-sorta-convinces herself that she has a teeny bit of magical power that enables her to keep her head high. 
 But I never lost the belief that you could will something just by sticking to it, by being unwavering. By keeping your eyes on the prize. And by doing that, there was nothing you couldnaEUR(tm)t control about your own life. 
 She's got great grades, good friends, a loving father. Desi just sucks at getting guys to notice her. Finally, she watched the k-dramas to which her dad has been long addicted, and like everything else she's ever done, sets out a plan to get the guy of her dreams. 
 From my experiences with k-dramas, I expected the worst, but honestly, this list is pretty realistic and not crazy.