Sunny Song Will Never Be Famous by Suzanne Park (ARC Review)

Title: Sunny Song Will Never Be Famous
Author: Suzanne Park
Type: Fiction
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Date published: June 1, 2021

A complimentary physical copy of this book was kindly provided by Raincoast Books in exchange for an honest review.

Sunny Song’s Big Summer Goals:
1) Make Rafael Kim my boyfriend (finally!)
2) Hit 100K followers (almost there…)
3) Have the best last summer of high school ever

Not on Sunny’s list: accidentally filming a PG-13 cooking video that goes viral (#browniegate). Extremely not on her list: being shipped off to a digital detox farm camp in Iowa (IOWA??) for a whole month. She’s traded in her WiFi connection for a butter churn, and if she wants any shot at growing her social media platform this summer, she’ll need to find a way back online.

But between some unexpected friendships and an alarmingly cute farm boy, Sunny might be surprised by the connections she makes when she’s forced to disconnect.

⤖ My Review ⬻

Before I dive into my review of Sunny Song Will Never Be Famous, I wanted to mention that when I picked up this book I was at a point in my journey as a reader where I was distancing myself from young adult contemporary books a little bit (or at least as much as I could outside of the books already on my TBR for the year).

I was aware of this going into Sunny Song Will Never Be Famous, so I wasn’t too surprised when I didn’t really resonate with what Sunny was going through–yes, I did understand the influencer aspect a little bit even if she has more followers than I likely ever will, but her age and the fact that she was in high school and thinking about college and all of those things… I’ve gotten to a point I think where those parts of my life are too far behind me for me to properly click with characters who are still in that period of their life.

I will say though that it was a little bit easier to get into the story and to resonate with Sunny and what she was going through once she left the big city and got to the camp. I’m not sure if it was just me but I did find the times that Suzanne Park’s adult rom-com writing peeked through the YA writing…but maybe that’s just because I’ve read an adult romance of hers in the past and I got a little bit in my head about it.

Sunny’s story as a whole I found to be quite entertaining–with little nuggets of teenage stress added in as well as, I would say, a lesson that I think people of all ages could benefit from hearing and learning from (having to do with social media and forgetting to live in the real world–but I won’t go into much detail about this because Park imparts this lesson a lot better than I could, and I also don’t want to spoil the book for those who haven’t read it yet). I definitely had a lot of fun reading Sunny Song Will Never Be Famous, and I think that it might actually be my favourite Suzanne Park book so far!

⤖ About the Author ⬻

Suzanne Park is a Korean-American writer who was born and raised in Tennessee. In her former life as a stand-up comedian, she was a finalist in the Oxygen Network’s “Girls Behaving Badly” talent search, and appeared on BET’s “Coming to the Stage.” Suzanne was also the winner of the Seattle Sierra Mist Comedy Competition, and was a semi-finalist in NBC’s “Stand Up For Diversity” showcase in San Francisco alongside comedians Ali Wong and Nico Santos. More info about her books can be found at https://linktr.ee/suzannepark