You Know Me Well is a deeply honest story about navigating the joys and heartaches of first love, one truth at a time. Who knows you well? Your best friend? Your boyfriend or girlfriend? A stranger you meet on a crazy night? No one, really?Mark and Kate have sat next to each other for an entire year, but have never spoken. For whatever reason, their paths outside of class have never crossed. That … of class have never crossed.
That is until Kate spots Mark miles away from home, out in the city for a wild, unexpected night. Kate is lost, having just run away from a chance to finally meet the girl she has been in love with from afar. Mark, meanwhile, is in love with his best friend Ryan, who may or may not feel the same way.
When Kate and Mark meet up, little do they know how important they will become to each other — and how, in a very short time, they will know each other better than any of the people who are supposed to know them more.
Told in alternating points of view by Nina LaCour, the award-winning author of Hold Still and The Disenchantments, and David Levithan, the bestselling author of Every Day and co-author of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (with Rachel Cohn) and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (with John Green).
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“The heart is a treacherous beast, but it means well.”
You Know Me Well is a story about love. First love. Unrequited love. Platonic love.
Mark is in love with his best friend, who may or may not feel the same way. They talk about a lot of things, but there’s also some things that are never talked about. Like how Ryan isn’t ready to be out yet or Mark’s feelings or how all this means that they’re maybe, sort of together, but definitely only in secret. But then Ryan decides he wants to brave Pride this year and they sneak out on an adventure together. When they each have other guys interested in them and their deep-seated jealousies come out, the next thing they know they’re fighting. Ryan’s dancing with some other guy. And Mark’s dancing on the bar in his underwear.
Kate is in love with the idea of Violet, her best friend’s mysterious and intriguing cousin who just moved to San Fransisco. Kate’s been dreaming of Violet for what feels like forever, but when the time comes for them to actually meet, Kate runs. And ends up hiding at the same bar as the boy she sits next to in calculus. Mark.
Panicked that she’s ruined her chance with Violet and sensing a kindred spirit in Mark, she declares them to be friends and enlists his help in fixing their night. Over the course of one crazy night and an tumultuous last week of the school year, they become closer than they ever expected, realizing that sometimes the least expected person is actually the person that knows you best.
There’s lots of things I liked. I liked the setting of San Francisco during Pride. I liked that the story was at it’s core just about love, and didn’t have the two main characters deal with any of the indecision and fear that comes with being a gay teenager. In this situation, the lack of realism was kind of refreshing. It was nice to briefly live in a world where Kate and Mark didn’t have to be afraid of name calling and physical violence from school bullies.
But then sometimes the lack of realism is hard to handle. I was okay with them living in world where there’s a bunch of gay students at a high school and everyone just accepts that. I’d like to think that that’s what the world will be like someday. I had a harder time with some of the less realistic plot points. I thought Violet was a straight up (thought definitely not straight) manic pixie dream girl. Before the novel starts she was traveling the world… with a circus. I kept expecting that as Kate got to know the real Violet, she’d feel more real, but that never really happened for me. I also really struggled through how at the beginning of the novel, Mark’s mom finds out that her teenage son has lied and snuck out to go to a gay club in the city during Pride and is now driving around in the middle of the night with a girl she’s never even heard of, let alone met. Her reaction? Telling him just to not stay out too late.
The whole novel had that sort of idealized world shininess to it that just turned me off from it a bit. But that really could have just been a me problem. If you can look past the things that make an adult reading a YA novel cringe, You Know Me Well really is a fun little view into a week from the points of views of two interesting, if a bit trite, gay characters.