• Age: 12 to 18
• Grade: 7 to 12

Better Than the Movies meets Olivia Rodrigo's Sour in a new YA romance novel from Something More author, Jackie Khalilieh.

Seventeen-year-old Jamie Taher-Foster has big plans for senior year. She's made a list of things and places in Toronto she and her boyfriend of three years, Ben Cameron, need to check off before graduating. And the biggest plan of all: a very special night for the two of them at the upcoming Winter Formal. But then Ben arrives back home after a summer away with an unthinkable announcement: he wants to break up.

And when Jamie discovers him with Olivia Chen the next day, she is determined to get him back. Even if that means fake dating the younger, curly-haired, TikTok dancer Axel Dahini, whose bicycle she accidentally ran over.

Though she and Axel have nothing in common aside from their shared Arab heritage — she's a messy, type A with anxiety; he's carefree but meticulous — their forced time together brings them to better understand one another. And for Jamie, it just might mean learning that not all experiences or people need to be crossed off a list.

Jackie Khalilieh's profile page

JACKIE KHALILIEH is a Palestinian Canadian writer with a penchant for Samoyeds, to-do lists and staying up way too late. She is passionate about positive representation within her writing. Something More, her debut YA novel, was shortlisted for the Ruth & Sylvia Schwartz Award, as well as the Snow Willow Award, and was selected for several Best of 2023 lists, including the New York Public Library and Audible Books Canada among others. She resides just outside Toronto, Canada, with her husband and two daughters, continuing to complain nightly about having to cook dinner.