Rating: 4/5 stars

“Not Here to Stay Friends” by Kaitlyn Hill (“Love From Scratch”) is the perfect book if you want to know the inner workings of a reality TV show. Liam’s dad is the executive producer on a new reality show, which is essentially “The Bachelor” but with a celebrity and everyone is a teenager.

Sloane is visiting Liam for the summer in Los Angeles, and is upset to find out that Liam has been roped into helping with the show. But when they visit the set the day before filming, Sloane gets roped into being a contestant. Sloane only agrees because Liam’s dad promises to help her fulfill her screenwriting dreams if she makes it to the top four.

Sloane and Liam ave been best friends for their entire lives, but when Liam was forced to move to LA after his dad made it big, they only saw each other once a year. Both Sloane and Liam are shocked to see the grown up versions of the other and it starts to stir up feelings they do not know what to do with.

Sloane has to stay on set with all the other girls, so she and Liam only see each other briefly on set. Aspen, the guy everyone is supposed to be swooning over, has taken a special interest in Sloane and decides early on he wants her to be his final girl.

In “Not Here to Stay Friends,” Hill does an amazing job of showing the entire process of a reality television show. If you are the kind of person who wants to binge every episode before they have even aired, this book is perfect for you.

This book is hilarious at times, and Hill does a great job of giving each character a specific personality. She is fairly new to the writing world, with this being her second book, but you could never tell. Her books are well written and have a developed plot.

“Not Here to Stay Friends” has an extremely satisfying ending that leaves the reader content after the intensity of the TV show. While it seems like this book is going to have the love triangle trope, it is not done in the way most authors do it. There is not much romance between Sloane and Aspen, which makes her and Liam’s relationship seem much more real.

Hill also touches on parental trauma a bit, though it does not bring down the light tone of the book. Both Sloane and Liam have their own issues outside of their friendship, but they are each other’s safe space.

There is only one thing that Hill could have done to make this book better: she should have given the reader a bit more closure on Aspen’s character. After everything unfolds during the series finale, no one hears from Aspen again and it leaves the reader wondering what his thoughts are.

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