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REVIEW: The Borrow a Boyfriend Club by Page Powars


Genre: Young Adult | LGBTQ+ | Romance

Release Date: 14th September 2023

Publisher: Hachette Childrens Group | Hodder Childrens Books

When sixteen-year-old Noah starts at a new school, he has a plan to ensure the students see him as his true gender: join the school's secretive Borrow a Boyfriend Club, where members rent themselves out to their classmates for dates. The endless "accidental slip-ups" that plagued him at his last school will be a thing of the past once he joins the club; after all, it has "boy" right in the title.

But he fails the audition. Desperate, he strikes a deal with the club's prickly president, Asher: he'll help lead the nearly-bankrupt club to victory at the school's fundraising dance competition, and in exchange Asher will allow Noah to prove his skills as a boyfriend in a series of tests that include romancing Asher himself.

As Noah passes test after test, his fake romance with Asher starts to feel surprisingly real, and Noah is faced with a dilemma. If he fails to win the dance fundraiser the club will go bankrupt, and he'll not only lose the new friends he's made - the whole school will know he isn't "boy enough". But if Noah succeeds in securing the club their victory, he'll have to follow the most important, unbreakable rule of the Borrow a Boyfriend Club: no real girlfriends (or boyfriends) allowed.

Will Noah risk breaking the rules for a chance at love?

"I'm not a girl, thank you very much. I'm just very pretty."

A joyously queer, painfully relatable coming-of-age and coming out story that made me feel all kinds of growing pains again.

This delightful YA romcom packs in your favourite familiar tropes in a refreshingly new package — think Netflix’s The Perfect Date but with serious self-discovery and beautifully queer romance.

Our narrator Noah was a delight — of course he’s sixteen, so he didn’t always make the best choices and was immensely frustrating at times but he’s literally a teenager so he was written pretty perfectly. His journey learning about his identity, gender and sexuality was of course difficult at times, but so authentic and written with so much love and care. I think coming out stories are so important, but so are stories like this that show the afterwards, the complicated legality of existing, of learning your relationship with your body again especially as a dancer like Noah.

He never expected how much decision to act as a stand-in date for his classmates would change everything, and even though we can see what’s going to happen, watching Noah try to figure it out was absolutely spectacular. He made me cringe, he made me reminisce, laugh, cry and fall totally in love with him.

The story moves fairly quickly but gives us plenty of time to sit with Noah and his thoughts; his narration is very direct to the reader and meanders along with this thoughts giving us a real insight into his thoughts. And there was such a deep tension; not only because Noah is just trying to live his life and facing so many obstacles, but this book reminded me in visceral detail what a pressure cooker school was and how serious everything felt back then.

A heartwarming story about finding yourself and your people that made my face hurt from smiling.


⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐


I was gifted an advanced reviewers copy of this title in return for an honest review. 

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