Counting Down With You follows Karina Ahmed, a reserved Bangladeshi teenager who finds herself faced with the biggest decision of her life after agreeing to fake date the school’s resident bad boy when her parents go abroad for a month. And you know what they say: when the cat’s away, the mice will play—and play Karina and her bad boy Ace Clyde will…
Counting Down With You combines all the right ingredients for an unforgettable YA read: an unlikely pairing, fake dating, parental expectations and a ticking time bomb.
While I loved the premise of the story, I had some issues with the execution. For one, there is a lot of repetition in this book that could have been cut out. Maybe this has been changed by the final draft, but in the ARC I read, every other page referred to Karina’s oppressive parents and their conservative stance. This, evidently, needs to be made clear to show how much Karina is following their guidance even when they’re gone on their trip, but it made it incredibly hard to slug through the first 30 percent of this story because the sentences surrounding this topic weren’t all that different. They followed the same trajectory, which really drove home the “indoctrination” but also made me groan by the seventh time they showed up. The same kind of goes for characterization – everyone, and I mean everyone, refers to Ace as the bad boy, yet he…never does anything bad? We hear tales and whispers and rumours but that’s about it.
With that in mind, my main issue with this book was, unexpectedly, the romance. I am a sucker for the fake dating trope—it’s up there in my top three for a reason—but I just couldn’t get behind it in Counting Down With You. This was largely due to the characters not being fleshed out enough. Ace is described as this bad boy, the sexy guy everyone in the school wants to be with—I mean he wears a leather jacket, what more can I say? And while that’s great, I kept waiting for…more? As the story progresses, we get more insight on Ace’s behalf but it never really made me root for him. I was waiting to feel the “sparks” Karina does, but Ace never did anything that made me invested in him—you know, besides the paying for stuff, which yes, was nice. Even the fake dating aspect was kind of just thrown into the mix without Karina’s consent, not to mention that there is a lot of miscommunication and delayed conversations and while I wanted to love this so much (who doesn’t love those moments where you can basically anticipate the characters getting together for real only for someone to interrupt them), I just kept getting more annoyed by it.
My issues with the love interest aside, I actually really liked our protagonist Karina. Karina struggles a lot with helicopter-parenting and completely unfair rules her parents have for her that do not apply to her little brother. On top of that, Karina deals with anxiety and I loved following her journey of finding ways to cope with it – there are some absolute gems of techniques in this book that I definitely used time and again and a few I will look into in the future. While I can’t speak for the representation in this book—Bangladeshi culture and Muslim religion—I thought it was explored in depth and not glossed over the less pretty aspects of expectations and misconceptions about what it means to be a young girl brought up in a strict family. The trope of parents wanting their children to become doctors has been around for decades and it always makes me sad to think that there are still families out there that pressure their children into following their parents’ dreams instead of letting them pursue their own.
My favourite part by far was Karina’s relationship with her grandmother. That woman was such a kind and loving character, not to mention that she had fierceness written on her forehead. There are some key scenes that include her and those alone made it worth finishing Counting Down With You. Karina’s friend squad is as exasperating as it is realistic. I chuckled at the moments where they would find an excuse to leave once Ace showed up and always encouraged Karina to stand up for herself. Though not everything was smooth sailings in their friendship, you could tell these girls would go to the ends of the earth for the others and that warmed my heart.
So, my griping about needing more dynamic characters and some repetition aside, Counting Down With You was a pleasant read that I’m sure anyone who loves diverse representation and has ever experienced anxiety will devour in one sitting.
Rich with Bangladeshi American Culture, a badass grandmother who will make you regret ever looking at her grandchild the wrong way, and the beloved fake-dating trope, Counting Down With You is a thoughtful and relatable debut that will make teens’ hearts beat faster.
Counting Down With You is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of May 4th 2021.
Will you be picking up Counting Down With You? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
A reserved Bangladeshi teenager has twenty-eight days to make the biggest decision of her life after agreeing to fake date her school’s resident bad boy. How do you make one month last a lifetime?
Karina Ahmed has a plan. Keep her head down, get through high school without a fuss, and follow her parents’ rules—even if it means sacrificing her dreams. When her parents go abroad to Bangladesh for four weeks, Karina expects some peace and quiet. Instead, one simple lie unravels everything.
Karina is my girlfriend.
Tutoring the school’s resident bad boy was already crossing a line. Pretending to date him? Out of the question. But Ace Clyde does everything right—he brings her coffee in the mornings, impresses her friends without trying, and even promises to buy her a dozen books (a week) if she goes along with his fake-dating facade. Though Karina agrees, she can’t help but start counting down the days until her parents come back.
T-minus twenty-eight days until everything returns to normal—but what if Karina no longer wants it to?
I love the book counting down with you its so true and her feelings are kinda like mind. Its amazing