Review of Not Here to Be Liked by Michelle Quan

*Not Here To Be Liked* by Michelle Quach (2021). Published by Katherine Tegen Books.

At the beginning of summer 2024, Amazon reached out into my emails and asked if I wanted to try Kindle Unlimited for three months for free.

While I know these kinds of subscriptions are a trap most of the time, I also knew that I was going to be traveling in South Korea throughout that summer and I was going to bring my Kindle. So I took the deal and then canceled it when the time came that I had to pay.

Usually, I just use my library when it comes to getting new books, and I do get advance copies of books because of this blog.

I was impressed with the selection that Kindle Unlimited offered, but I would rather get my books from the library delivered through Libby or Overdrive onto my Kindle. That’s free, plus I’d rather support libraries in a time where they are receiving less funding.

But like I said, I was impressed with the selection. I used this opportunity to read some books that I would never read or pick up at the library on my own, and Not Here To Be Liked was one of them.

Young adult books are a quick read for me, as the language itself tends to be simple and the plots tend to largely be the same. I avoid them for this reason, plus I tend to go for literary fiction or nonfiction more.

The synopsis is what interested me on this book, and boy do I have some thoughts about what I read. I don’t want to ramble too much, as this is only the introduction, so let’s get into the review.

A high school girl, humiliated she didn’t win a position she wanted, asserts sexism was a part of what happened here.

The main character in this novel is Eliza Quan, and she’s a bit of a perfectionist. The daughter of Chinese-Vietnamese immigrants, she’s dedicated her time to try and become the editor-in-chief of her high school’s newspaper, and the time has finally come around to vote for who will be the next head of the paper.

Imagine her disappointment when an ex-jock, Len, who has barely been on the paper’s staff decides to run against her. Len barely has the qualifications for the job, but he wants to give it a hand and seems to be a decent candidate in terms of his leadership capabilities alone.

Disappointment turns into rage when Len wins the position. Eliza decides to write an essay about how sexism and discrimination is what led to this happening, and she doesn’t intend for it to go out into the world. It was kind of a moment where someone rages and puts all of their thoughts on paper (like a journal), but somehow it ends up on the front page of the paper’s website the next day.

It ends up viral, and half of the school is inspired to have a feminist movement, with Eliza becoming the face of it, and the other half thinking that she’s crying foul because she didn’t win the position she wanted. We get a small insight into how the other people working at the paper think—Eliza’s overbearing personality certainly isn’t winning a lot of others over.

We also see how it shifts her dynamics personally. Eliza and her best friend Winona, a high school filmmaker who is trying to make it a male dominated industry, are suspicious when popular girl Serena ends up championing the feminism and anti-sexism movement herself, and this begins debates about whether people are being performative or not.

Throughout the book we also get glimpses into how Len is reacting to this. I couldn’t imagine how this kid feels throughout the course of the novel, as legitimate grounds for discrimination can have serious ramifications in the real world. It becomes odd to me that the novel becomes a romance later on too, as I can’t imagine myself in this situation and being mentally okay.

The romance comes about as the school principal and administration of the paper force Eliza and Len to do projects and reports together. The more these two spend time with each other, the more Eliza begins to humanize him a bit and think about how he’s actually kind of attractive. After all, hate sometimes turns into love.

Overall Thoughts

If we’re going to be honest, I didn’t care much for this novel. I looked up some reviews of it after reading it, and before writing this review, and I think there’s a line between saying a novel is trash and disagreeing with the main character.

Eliza is pretty unlikeable, and my take is that she did take her actions a little too far and that she shouldn’t have gone straight for the discrimination angle. It wasn’t entirely her fault that the essay was published, but maybe she should’ve just journaled it out in the first place.

I get it was frustrating, but there were some signs people didn’t like her before this. There is also a kernel of truth that a hard-working Asian girl that comes across as too ambitious/overbearing might not be selected over a former popular male jock. She just took it too far to note have concrete evidence and ranted instead.

Regardless, just because you disagree with the main character doesn’t mean a novel is terrible. I personally did not care for the novel, as I said before, and I think the romance element is a bit out there, but the writing itself isn’t bad. We can critically think about books while not endorsing what is written on the page.

Anyways, read this is you’re interested and want to. Don’t let people decide what you think about a book for you and take a chance on it yourself.

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