Review: The One That I Want by Jennifer Echols

Title: The One That I Want
Author: Jennifer Echols
Published December 6th 2011 by Simon Pulse
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Overweight, a bit of an eccentric and kind of friendless Gemma is trying out for majorette at her school. I instantly liked Gemma, from her dry wit and her style, to the way she dealt with everything in her life, I sympathized with her. Been there, done that. Her only friends are Robert (she has a crush on him) who is a jerk that treats her horrible, and Addison who is a bitch (I don’t even say this word out loud but there’s no other way to describe her) who treats Gemma even worse than Robert.

So why does Gemma puts up with her, you ask? Well, because her mother and Addison’s mother practically forced them to be friends (I can relate) and she has no heart to tell her mother “no”, especially because she's been kind of down since the divorce.

OMG. This picture is so them! Gemma with a chubby, slightly scared face and ponytails. And there's blond Addison with a "I'm the best frenemie ever" face. 

So anyway the real story starts to unfold in the summer, Gemma has lost 50 pounds and is taking majorette summer camp with Addison, right next door to a football camp, where a cute boy, Max, was totally checking Gemma out!... or so she thinks. But when both Gemma and Addison come up to where Max is Addison totally flirts with him and acts like she was the one Max was interested in. So Gemma then gets to go with Max's friend Carter, who is Mr. Grumpy. 

The more Gemma gets to know Max, the more she feels the connection with him and the more she senses he likes her too. But Addison doesn’t let Max go, even though there’s clearly no chemistry there, so Gemma can’t make a move on him. Things are complicated and interesting, enough to hold my attention through the wee hours. But there was something that didn’t click with me and this book. Even though I relate to a lot to Gemma and even though the boy (Max) was really cute (inside and out).

It was a very cute story and very cool characters were in it. I don’t have complains, people. This book was better than some of the big-hype ones (you know which ones I mean). It's really fun and you will find yourself rooting for Gemma and falling for Max, too.