I have read all 5 of Elle McNicoll’s published Middle Grade books and loved them all so had very high expectations going into this and was very excited to have an early copy to read.
Some Like it Cold follows Jasper who has come home from uni for the first time after 18 months and with secrets she's keeping from both her family and the town that means she’s back to stay goodbye. Arthur who runs the local cinema with his brother and is attempting to create a film about Lake Pristine, but to Jasper he is looking like a reason why saying goodbye might not be the best idea.
This is Elle McNicoll’s YA debut romance book and I love that she has made the decision to write romance because I loved this so much and we need more autistic romances. This is definitely for the upper end of YA but it still feels like it’s for YA which YA books don’t always feel like they are.
We get the perspective of both Jasper and Arthur throughout the story which I liked to see. It was nice to see the feelings build up during the story but also I really connected with Jasper and a lot of that came from being in her head. It was also nice to see Arthur’s perspective on a lot of things that went on with Jasper. This worked really well for the story as a whole.
Something else I really liked about the writing was how many of the things that Jasper struggled with were written, including masking, which I don’t think has ever been discussed as much in any book I have read before, the way she has learned to read people and the way she experiences sensory overload. There were so many quotes I connected too and wrote down so that I can look back on. Often books describe things that I am unable to in ways that I really connect to, so those quotes are great ways to describe how I feel with specific things to people that don’t experience things in the same ways.
Along with Arthur and Jasper we see a lot of other characters who live in this town and they went to school with. You see a wide variety of characters that live in town, whether they be older than Jasper, her age or younger. You see how big of a range of people live here which was great because there were characters you liked, you understood and you think needed a stern talking to.
I liked seeing Odette and Jasper’s friendship, how it’s changed due to Jasper being at university and how much they still mean to each other. Odette was a character whose actions felt very understandable and it’s really nice to see how much they still have a strong understanding of each other after this time away and over the course of the book you see Odette make some realisations and Jasper and Odette come back together after some distance between them that felt complete real between these characters in a way that you would expect to happen when one moves away.
Both Arthur and Jasper’s families were heavily involved in the story. I really liked both of Arthur’s siblings, the three of them were close in ways that were great to see and Grace was a character who I was always happy to see. Jasper’s family on the other hand are known to be one of the top families of the town and have struggled to accept her diagnosis properly and what it means for Jasper. I had mixed feelings towards Christine at many times because she was great to Jasper but also really mean to Jasper and many others in the town but by the end of the book she had definitely grown in my opinion she still wasn’t my favourite. Jasper’s parents also improved over the course of the story but I again I can’t say I was their biggest fan by the time I got to the end.
There were many other characters in town that I liked including Hera that I would like to see more of and I’m so glad Elle McNicoll is writing more in Lake Pristine but I would love to know which character’s we will be following because I love Lake Pristine and it’s residents so so much.
Jasper and Arthur were both flawed and had things that they were aware weren’t perfect about them but they were still characters that I really liked and wanted the best for at all times in the story. I really connected to Jasper as a character and was so glad to have read her story because of how much I connected to her and her struggles.
You could see how much the author loves rom coms when reading, it comes right through into the story when reading about both Jasper’s special interest and the love story between Arthur and Jasper. There was fantastic neurodivergent representation in this book which is exactly what I have come to expect from Elle McNicoll in six books, it discussed masking in an amazing way, sensory overload and social interactions it didn’t feel like it was just added in because she wanted to have people understand what being autistic is like instead it felt like it was authentic to Jasper and who she was as a person and how her life was as an autistic girl in a small town that wasn’t the most understanding. Jasper’s family and their views on her diagnosis was also interesting to see because it’s not something that I think I see often in books in the way that it was represented here and how Jasper’s opinion on it differed to theirs.
This book made me feel so seen in such an amazing way that I haven’t felt so strongly in any book before and I know the story will stick with me for quite a while. I would highly recommend it to all readers because the romance is fantastic as is the representation and it’s one that upon release I definitely think you should be picking up from bookshops. It is a new favourite YA romance that I will be rereading many times, and could not rate anything but five stars.
Thank you to Pan Macmillan and Bethan Thomas for an early proof copy ahead of release.
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