One of the Indie Author’s I follow is Ginger Li, I’ve read her Light and Fire series and I loved it so when she announced she was looking for ARC readers for her new book: XOXO, Piper, I was supper excited. The Light and Fire series is a YA Fantasy series, if that’s your genre I recommend checking it out. XOXO, Piper is a YA Romance, I wanted to hate it but I ended up giving this book 4 stars on Goodreads.

You read that right, I wanted to hate this book. Here’s why, “I knew Asher Thompson was trouble the moment he stepped into my grandmother’s café. He hates donuts. He hates chocolate.” I sent that to everyone I knew and told them that I will not fall in love with his character. How can you hate donuts?! How can you hate chocolate? (My daughter hates chocolate and I call her weird all the time.) I love donuts, we’re having donuts at my wedding. I assumed Asher was going to be this annoying health freak and just ruin things. I was kind of right.

If you’re still interested after that anti donut/chocolate sentence here’s what the book is about; a girl who was home schooled her whole life in New York moves to California to live with her grandmother for her senior year. She has a five year old brother who is autistic. His preschool has a really great program for children like him but they are about to lose a lot of their funding. Piper and her new friends are going to have a fundraiser to help his school. Although they’re not friends, Asher is going to help because it will look good on his college applications. Together these five kids put together a really great fundraiser to help out an amazing program.

It took me some time to even start to like Asher, I did not want them to be together because I thought he was childish. I’m almost 30, of course I’m going to think a high school boy is childish. He wants to pull her hair in one of the chapters, it annoyed me but it does sound like something a 17 year old boy would do. (He didn’t end up doing it by the way, thankfully.) Remember how he hates donuts? Well, Asher used to be over weight, with family stress he just gave into food so I can see why he health conscious. Part of me would have liked more about that but the book did focus on mainly Piper which is still fine because she is our main character.

Once I got past our donut hater I really fell in love with the book. There were so many moments that made me smile because it was just so adorable and just gave me a happy feeling. Piper made some really greats friends and she found love in music again. Communication with her and Asher got better, I do love them together. Really my only complaint is I wished there was more between Piper and her dad. As I said above, she just moved in with her grandmother but her dad is still alive. He’s not very supportive of Piper and some resolution between the two would have been nice.

I believe the book would have been great as a stand alone but it is part of a series. Next in the series we will see Piper’s friend Violet. She’s a bit of mystery since she is a shy character but I do look forward to reading it. I’m hoping, since this is a series, we might get some more details with Piper and her dad because I’m not okay with how he acted for her decisions on her future.

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