There is this phrase in the world of girls: “He’s my boyfriend; he just doesn’t know it yet.” It means stay away from him. It means that girls have to be very careful when telling her best friends they have crushes because if both of them have the same crush, there will be trouble even if the boy is completely oblivious.
Growing up, I occasionally heard about conflicts such as these between girls but never had to deal with anything similar with other boys. If two guys are talking about the same girl they like, by that point one of them has already been rejected by the girl.
What if girls were to find a unique way of dealing with this, one that wouldn’t involve anyone being called a back-stabber? There’s this book called “Sharing Hunter” by Julie Glover, in which a couple of girls come up with a plan.
This book is told in first person, split between two main characters, and the first one, Chloe, decides the way to handle this problem is to share the boy, Hunter, who seems to be perfect in just about every aspect. Chloe’s idea is that she and her best friend, Rachel, will alternate which day they get the benefits of Hunter walking her to class and also getting to hang out with him after school.
And if you’re thinking this is going to cause trouble, you’re right. At first I wondered if this book had been mislabeled in its Amazon categories and was really a YA harem romance novel, but thankfully it’s not that kind of book. In the hands of a different author, this would involve all kinds of moaning and heavy breathing, and if this were an HBO mini-series, several characters would get stabbed by episode four.
This book inverts the standard romance novel structure, which is a big deal for a jaded male reader such as myself. My YA-Christian contemporary books share shelf space with an awful lot of romances, and boy am I getting tired of reading those for market research. Usually a romance novel starts with Duke Dashing showing up on his High Horse, and the woman sees this and hopes for a Quality Relationship. Whenever I see this, I think, sweetheart, if you’re looking for a Quality Relationship, just steal the horse. But no, a standard romance has to go on for hundreds of pages about how this dream is realized.
The way Sharing Hunter is set up, the arranged dating relationship becomes a device through which the two main characters have to work through their control and confidence issues, and that is far more interesting than the usual romance. Chloe’s the control freak here, thinking she can know everything that’s going to happen with her best friend, right down to the college that they’re going to apply to and which dorm room they’re going to live in. Chloe is also a brilliant student who is in the running for the valedictorian’s spot at her high school. Also she thinks that this shared-boyfriend arrangement is the way to write the best research paper possible on alternative relationships for her psychology class and thus earn the extra credit necessary to have the valedictorian position in the bag. Rachel is the shy one, an artist who can’t bear the thought of showing someone else her work. At the beginning of the book, her best and only fan of her sketchbook is her nine-year-old brother, Evan, an unusually nice boy for a younger sibling appearing in a YA novel. Rachel is trying to figure out what she really wants to do with her art and where she wants to go to college, and she thinks she has Chloe’s support on both. As the novel goes on, a conflict develops between Chloe’s support and Chloe’s control, and this is the problem that’s going to force both girls to express who they really are and what they really want.
You don’t know who is going to be together with whom at the end, and keeping me guessing on that was an important thing to keeping me reading. I was guessing that Chloe was going to end up writing the best research paper possible and then get busted for unethical research practices. (Spoiler: no.)
I did have a few minor problems with this book: one character is dealing with a long-ago trauma and when it finally gets told in full at the two-thirds point in the book, you’re going to think it wasn’t worth the wait. At the three-quarters mark, a character finds an object and this provokes a huge reaction, way bigger than you’d expect. It seemed a little contrived, wedged in there to cause a meltdown needed by the plot.
But that meltdown does occur and it leads all of the characters to an understanding that even good people create bad plans. And there does come a reconciliation to the awfulness that they have to work at, a solution that leaves people with only some of what they want, thus ending one of the nicer books I’ve read in a while. And I do mean that.
Another new reading opportunity is that Julie Glover released another book called “Daring Charlotte” just last month, in September 2023. It doesn’t appear to be a sequel, but does have similar cover art. So I’ll be checking that out in the next few weeks, too.
