Synopsis:
After winning the heart of the most popular girl in school, dorky Albert risks losing it all when her alpha ex-boyfriend develops Hodgkin’s.

Review:
Imagine the dorkiest kid you can imagine–the guy with no social filter, the one who’s never seen talking to anyone, who eats lunch in the cafeteria and never makes eye contact. Now picture the pretty popular girl with perfect calves and bouncy hair and a smile that’s an invitation to share in eternal happiness. Now make them kiss. You can’t do it, can you? It’s impossible to conceive of such a thing–yet David Yoo, in Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before makes the scenario not only believable, but achingly, poignantly real.

Yoo has the wit of a Larry Doyle or a Gordon Korman, and all the heart of the best movies in John Hughes’s canon. I totally have a reader/author crush on him for writing this book. I got completely swept up in the love story to the point where I was having trouble remembering that I am not actually a geeky Korean-American high school boy. When Albert hurt, I hurt–bad. Yoo gets all the aching emotions of first love gone bad so terribly right that it’s hard to read in the best kind of way.

I’m going to have an interview with Yoo running in a few days, and hope all my YA-loving readers will stuff their own stockings with this book.