Perfect on Paper

Perfect on Paper is a young adult romance by Sophie Gonzales, published in 2021, and its heroine is a girl who can solve other people's relationships and not her own.

Darcy Phillips has built a small business out of other people's romantic problems: letters go into locker 89, advice comes back, and a fee changes hands. She is good at it, and she has excellent reasons for keeping her identity secret, because the advice is technically against school rules and because the person she is closest to is part of the tangle she is trying to manage. Then Alexander Brougham, the new Australian jock she cannot stand, catches her in the act and uses the information to get what he wants: a dating coach to help him win back his ex-girlfriend. Darcy agrees, reluctantly, and the arrangement has the usual consequence, which is that she and Brougham spend a lot of time discussing his love life and gradually begin to like each other. The novel alternates between the coaching and Darcy's own confusion about what she wants.

Gonzales writes comedy with a genuine interest in the ethics of giving advice you are not taking, and the book's warmth rests on a heroine who is clever about everybody except herself.