Going Bicoastal is lively, sprightly, and fun as all get out. Taking a Sliding Doors approach to one teen’s choice between parents, coasts, and summer experiences, it’s warm and fun, the sort of tale that any young reader will truly enjoy.

Seventeen-year-old Natalya – Tal – Fox turns to her best friend, Camila Morales, in an attempt to figure out how to spend her summer vacation. Choice one: she stays at home in New York City with her dad, which will mean being close to everything she knows – and having time to pursue The Redhead, her crush, whom she has not had the courage to approach yet. Choice two: go to Los Angeles and spend time with her mom, with whom she has not been in frequent contact with since Melissa moved to LA for a promotion and Tal refused to uproot herself. There, she has no idea what’s waiting for her, other than adventure and hopefully a closer connection to her mom.

In alternating chapters, the story explores Tal’s two options; in one reality, she stays in New York and with her dad. There, she gets to know The Redhead, whose name is Elly Knight. During her staycation, Tal learns more about New York, broadens her friend base, takes on several volunteer jobs – and gets ever closer to Elly. In the other reality, she flies to Los Angeles and tries to adapt to the west coast. Along the way she attempts to get closer to her mom, takes up an internship at her company, and meets Adam Rose, her infuriating competition at the job. It turns out that Adam has unknown depths, and the two of them have more in common than Tal initially thought. Readers have the chance to watch two different romances, two different summers, and two different versions of Tal’s relationship with her parents bloom, right up to the two-part ending.

Going Bicoastal is one part choose-your-own-adventure novel, one part sweethearted romance. Tal is a likable girl, and both of her romances are sweet as pie. I got attached to both Elly and Adam and I kind of wished Tal didn’t have to choose between them.

Tal’s folks and her relationship with them is wonderfully nuanced. Her dad, Ezra, is math-obsessed and brainy, which means he sometimes comes off as self-absorbed; Melissa, meanwhile, is so wrapped up in her work that making time for Tal has become a secondary priority. The LA chapters do a good job of using Adam to bring Tal and Melissa back close together. While Tal clearly loves both parents, there’s a distance there; as she says early in the book, her parents did not intend to have her, and the resultant battle with each other and over Tal has left them all in strained circumstances. Things do get a little better here over time.

The diversity here is wonderful; Tal is Jewish and bisexual, and the book absolutely makes her faith a true part of her character. Her friends practice different faiths, have different gender identities and sexualities and are of a multitude of different races, but they hum along in one semi-harmonious hive. That’s the glory of real life at its best brought to the page. Going Bicoastal allows its main character to dream wild and free, creating quite the entertaining novel.