Some books you have to rate purely on how fondly its target audience will look upon them. So it is for me with Our Cursed Love, a book whose melodrama annoyed me – but which will definitely appeal to the teenagers it’s aimed at.

Cam Yasuda and Remy Kobata have been best friends since they were in diapers. The two of them have been inseparable for decades, but as Remy prepares to go far away to college while Cam stays home to live up to his father’s expectations, it looks like that’s about to end. Remy has always wanted them to be more, but just as their senior year of high school prepares to set in and she braces herself to confess her feelings during a Christmastime trip to Japan during their winter break, she learns, at a tealeaf ceremony, that Cam isn’t her soulmate.

Impulsively, they journey together to a forbidden potion shop. Magic has always existed in their world, and soulmates have always been a thing. Sipping a special, forbidden-by-law potion in order to find out who their true soulmate is ahead of time wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it? What harm can it do?

But the potion has completely unintended side effects. Drinking it causes Cam to begin to forget Remy. If she can’t help him remember who she is before midnight on New Year’s Eve, they’ll both completely forget one another.

This, naturally, leads to a lot of intense emotions, some stutter-typing, and some good old fashioned angst. Depending on how young at heart you are, Our Cursed Love will either annoy you or make you feel like you’re reliving your teenage years.

These are average, kind kids who are worth rooting for, even when the magic system is so inefficient you won’t understand how or why they’re being kept apart. The romance between them is filled with yearning and tension and fraught feelings – I leave it to the reader to find out how they end up together.

There’s a red herring love interest, the enchantment of a magical Tokyo, and much discussion of the art of trying to grow up and into yourself. But it’s all told in such a dramatic, teeth-gnashing way that older folks will want these kids to just get over themselves already.

But when I was sixteen? I gobbled this stuff up like candy. And today’s teenagers are quite likely to do the same thing. For them, Our Cursed Love  might be a solid B or more, but adult-me can not go higher than a qualified recommendation and a B-minus.