
How to Lose a Best Friend
MTV Books · Print & ebook · September 23, 2025
A Romance pick for readers exploring How to Lose a Best Friend.
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- Who it’s for
- A close friendship becomes a sharp look at romantic pressure and the right to choose.
- Themes
- Romantic entitlement, Social pressure, Freedom to choose whom to love
- Genres
- Contemporary YA Romance, Friendship for Teens, Dating & Sex for Teens
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Start with this bookAbout this book
This “important and necessary book for our time” (Amber Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Way I Used to Be) confronts the myth of the friend zone as a boy in love with his best friend feels he’s owed a chance at romance—and she’s the only one in their lives who disagrees. For as long as anyone can remember, Zeke Ladoja and Imogen Parker have been best friends. Their classmates, their parents, and even the school custodian think that they’re meant to be together.
Continue reading
And that’s exactly what Zeke wants: for Gen to be his girlfriend. Now that she’s about to be sixteen (and allowed to date), Zeke is finally going to tell her how he feels—in front of everyone at her birthday party. Imogen loves Zeke with all her heart, but only as a friend. The pressure to be with Zeke has sometimes been overwhelming, but up to this point, she’s been able to manage it. Then she falls for the new boy, Trevor Cook, and she knows the news will devastate Zeke. The last thing she wants to do is hurt her best friend, but she also resents the fact that no one seems to care about what she wants. The night of Gen’s party, everything goes wrong. There’s backlash, most of it directed at Gen, and Zeke feels emboldened. He isn’t about to give up on his feelings, and he’ll do whatever it takes to prove that she made the wrong choice…even if it means destroying their friendship. But Gen isn’t about to give up on fighting for herself and the freedom to love the boy she wants, not the boy she’s expected to be with.
Friendship Under Pressure
A close friendship becomes a sharp look at romantic pressure and the right to choose.
Come here for
- The tension between being loved and being treated as owed
- A teen romance that questions who gets to decide what love should become
Expect
- Social pressure colliding with loyalty, hurt, and the insistence on choice
Where it sits
| Contemporary YA Romance | 78% |
|---|---|
| Dating & Sex for Teens | 65% |
| Friendship for Teens | 55% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- African American YA
- Contemporary YA Romance
- Dating & Sex for Teens
- Authors
- Jordan K. Casomar
- Publisher
- MTV Books
- Published
- September 23, 2025
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Romantic entitlement · Social pressure · Freedom to choose whom to love
- Reading lane
- African American YA