Counting Down with You

Tashie Bhuiyan

2021 • 416 pages

Ratings16

Average rating3.2

In this sparkling and romantic YA debut, 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?

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Popular Reviews

Reviews with the most likes.

Emi

Okay this was incredibly cheesy and had fake dating (which, I've realized now, I don't like) but it was still cute and it referenced Louis Tomlinson, Harry Styles, and One Direction so that's a plus.

July 18, 2021

mina

honestly idk if this book was bad or if I just found out i HATE contemporary YA romance books

September 5, 2022

Mars

Rating: 2.5
Well I definitely did not expect for my rating to be this low... Let me start with the things I absolutely adored about this book, the MC deals with anxiety which is great rep & I also felt connected to her on a personal level because of it. She (Karina) also loves English and I do too! I thought it was clever how the title is “Counting down with you” not only because Karina is counting down the days until her parents arrive back home but she also counts down to help with her anxiety and I thought that was neat. This book also includes fake dating which is one of my favorite tropes!This book has Bangladeshi & Muslim representation, I'm not an ownvoices reviewer for this book, so please look at reviews by Bangladeshi and Muslim reviewers for their thoughts on the representation! But I do think Ace & the romance aspect is what I most enjoyed about the book.

Now for the nitty gritty, I found Karina to start getting annoying after a while, I do feel as though most of this novel is her inner dialogue so with that being said a lot of her thoughts are super repetitive. I do think people could really love Karina and really relate to what she was dealing with/going through and how she deals with it but it wasn't my cup of tea. She would go to people and ask for advice & in turn she would ignore the advice given just to complain about the same situation she ignored the advice for. I do understand to a certain extent though because I did see how hard it was for her. Also I think this book could've been at least 100 pages shorter, I found it to be really redundant which bothered me.
This wasn't that big of a deal for me but I also wasn't a big fan of the Gen Z talk the author incorporated. Just felt a bit cringey.

All in all this is a really sweet book & it's a quick fun read, the MC just wasn't that likeable to me despite all of the similarities we shared and how much I saw myself in her, I wish I enjoyed this book more than I did.

February 22, 2022