Bookspry

What if the love of your life has been sitting next to you on the bus, sharing your earbuds, for five years straight?

Lilly Jones is everyone’s favorite person at Venice Beach High — the girl who bakes brownies for classmates, tutors freshmen, and volunteers for every committee like her life depends on it. Because honestly? It kind of does. If she’s useful enough, maybe no one will notice that the girl behind the sun-streaked hair and wide smile is quietly falling apart.

Her anchor i...
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What if the love of your life has been sitting next to you on the bus, sharing your earbuds, for five years straight?

Lilly Jones is everyone’s favorite person at Venice Beach High — the girl who bakes brownies for classmates, tutors freshmen, and volunteers for every committee like her life depends on it. Because honestly? It kind of does. If she’s useful enough, maybe no one will notice that the girl behind the sun-streaked hair and wide smile is quietly falling apart.

Her anchor in all of it is Sean Sullivan — best friend since ninth grade, king of the terrible joke, and the only person on earth who can make her laugh so hard she forgets to doubt herself. They share earbuds on the bus, lose quarters at the Breakwater Arcade, and trade mixtapes with names like “Songs For When Phoebe Brightmore Is Being A Demon.”

Sean is also desperately, hopelessly, catastrophically in love with her.

But he’s built an entire personality out of self-deprecating humor specifically so Lilly will never, ever find that out. Because she is the most beautiful girl in any room she walks into, and he is the guy who makes her snort-laugh, and in his mind, those two roles don’t overlap.

Songs That Don’t Suck is a swoony, heartfelt, laugh-out-loud ’90s love story about the moment you realize the person who was always there — the one with the mixtape and the bad impressions and the peanut butter toast at midnight — was your person all along.

You were just too scared to reach for him.

Perfect for fans of ’90s nostalgia, high school drama, and ugly-crying over a boy who was right there the whole time.
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