Book Review: Right Text, Wrong Number (Offsides, #1) by Natalie Decker

Title: Right Text, Wrong Number
Series: Offsides
Book Number: 1

Author: Natalie Decker

Genre: YA Romance

Finished: July 13, 2017

Layla seems to have everything: she is pretty, popular, a cheerleader, and has a gorgeous football playing boyfriend. Despite her dyslexia, her life is pretty good. Until she catches her boyfriend Adam cheating on her, which she finds out when she checks Adam’s phone and sees a sexy text from the girl. The next string of events in Layla’s life seal her fate and she is caught up in a complicated and not so serendipitous web of romance and uncertainty. Because Layla means to send a text to Adam’s mistress, but ends up mixing up the number—thanks dyslexia—and instead sends it to the one boy in school she can’t stand: Tyler. Their personalities clash when they are face to face, but they have an instant emotional connection via text message. Of course, neither knows who they are talking to. Tyler is the first to find out, cleverly using context clues. By that point Tyler knows it is too late: he ikes Layla. It takes Layla a bit longer to realize the man she is slowly falling in love with is the man she can’t stand. And then she falls in love with the real man she can’t stand. Now Layla feels torn: the man on the phone versus Tyler, not knowing they are the same man.

I’m way out of high school, so I probably don’t remember what it was like to be emotionally driven and hormonal. Teenagers can be pretty unreasonable. It seemed, to me, the rivalry between Layla and Tyler was a little too… unexplainably extreme. Many times I thought to myself, “well, that escalated too quickly.” Like, Tyler would say one comment and Layla would freak out and do things like smack his phone away.

The pacing was good and there was enough internal dialogue and development to satisfy any reader. Layla and Tyler went from a point of hating each other to liking each other and having to reconcile that with their former anathema at good speed, so the development of their feelings was believable and genuine. The ending was straight out of a John Hughes movie, complete with dance reveal wherein the girl walks in looking beautiful in her dress and they boy is rendered speechless before the two of them admit to each other that they are deeply and madly in love. I just with there was more power to the moment when Layla realized that the man on the phone was Tyler. It was reduced in the book to one short line of, “Oh my god” caliber, and then the story moved on. I would have liked for their to be bit more emotion, and more time dedicated to how Layla felt when she found out about Tyler. Because as it was, it felt anti-climactic; the buildup seemed drained by the quickness of the revelation.

This is a cute and solid young adult romance. A high school story of woe and love. You pity and root for Layla and Tyler, hoping the two of them get over their immense dislike for one another, that finding out about their text message tryst doesn’t tear them apart doesn’t end what they feel. You want them to end up together, and feel victorious when they do.