Emma Lord's THE RIVAL

​Thanks to partners NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the digital ARC of Emma Lord’s The Rival, which will be published on January 21. 

Emma Lord has such a talent for writing YA romances with compelling premises that don’t fall victim to oversimplification. (It’s why she’s one of my auto-read authors.) With her newest novel The Rival, she tells a sort of enemies-to-lovers romance that confronts the challenges of being a college freshman and the best way to stand up for a cause we believe in.

Sadie earned her high school’s single, coveted spot at Maple Ride University, winning out over her family friend—and secret, long-time rival—Seb, who’s attending a different, prestigious school. Sadie is determined to make her mark at Maple Ride and to earn the one staff position for a freshman at the college’s zine Newsbag, all as a way of setting up her comedy career.

There’s a twist, of course. Seb, who was waitlisted, has shown up on campus. And he also wants to join the Newsbag staff.

Sadie had looked forward to escaping the constant challenges of her rivalry with Seb but also of establishing a new, true college identity, the one she had never been able to live out when she was with our family. With them? Well, they’re A. LOT. And Sadie always finds herself in the role of mediator, smoothing things over, evening out everyone’s emotions. Now? She may want to be a lot, too.

That’s the initial setup. Add in a budget controversy in which the college is pulling money away from extracurriculars like Newsbag to fund their sports teams, and there’s the perfect recipe for a compelling, complicated, wonderful YA novel.

The romance is at the center of the book here, but it’s not the only focus. There are wonderful conversations about Sadie and Seb’s challenges as they leave their families—they’re excited to be on their own, homesick for their families, ready to carve out new identities, but not quite prepared to leave who they were behind. There are great considerations of friendship, of how to be an advocate and an ally without dismissing the concerns of those who may be affected by change. There’s a fantastic subplot about romantic relationships—Sadie is completely inexperienced and, now that she’s in college, is having a hard time moving past the feeling that she is the ONLY one who is in her same position.

That may sound like too much, but Emma Lord makes it work. The Rival navigates these various threads easily, with humor and empathy and swoony romance. It epitomizes everything I love about Lord’s writing.

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