High school junior Emilie Hornby runs her life like a CEO. Her outfits are planned. Her days are planned. Her relationship with Josh is planned to the point that she decides exactly when and how she will first tell him that she loves him: Valentine’s Day. She concedes that VD is a commercialized, Hallmark holiday, but she also believes in true love. 

But Emilie’s perfect Valentine’s Day scenario doesn’t go quite as planned. First of all, on the way to school she gets into a fender bender with her Chemistry lab partner Nick Stark, who doesn’t seem to know who she is. Then, when she gets to school, she and Josh don’t seem able to connect. When she does track him down, she discovers his sitting in the front seat of his car with the beautiful Macy. At home, she gets more bad news from her father. The whole day is a disaster. And even stranger, when she wakes up the next morning, it’s Valentine’s Day all over again. And the day after that it was another “been here, done that.”

Lynn Painter’s YA romance The Do-Over is a frothy confection of a novel and although I tend to like my romances more tart than sweet, I couldn’t help but fall in love with Emilie as she tries to find a way out of the time loop she seems stuck in.

Emilie has got her life buttoned down, and maybe that’s because some aspects of her life are complicated. But things go seriously off the rails when she and Nick (who is totally my kind of love-interest) start spending more time with each other and the results are swoon-worthy.

A YA romance worth your time.