Wonderfully brash, brassy and alive, Seven Percent of Ro Devereux is brimming with zest and some surprisingly salty language, as well as a heroine who will not be forgotten by young readers who try out her adventures. Ellen O’Clover has a wonderfully engaging authorial voice, which definitely helps smooth things along.

Ro Devereux has an eye to the future. She’s created an app called MASH – an acronym for Mansion Apartment Shack House, as it’s based on an old childhood game – for a class project that will cap her senior year of high school. But she hopes that selling it will fund her future and send her to Silicon Valley without having to get a college education. Her father wants her to go to college anyway, but MASH immediately gains the attention of tech investors – as would any app which can guess the majority of major events in a person’s future – down to who their soulmate will be – with ninety-three percent accuracy.

Ro runs the app in front of her investor and is alarmed when she’s matched with her former friend, Alastair Miller. They were thick as thieves during their childhood, but following a severe fight, haven’t spoken with each other for three years. To avoid scaring off the investors, Ro contacts Miller and they agree to pretend to date to prove the app’s validity. Might MASH be right? Or have Ro and Miller’s feelings fallen into that seven percent margin of error?

What a delightful book. Ro is a heroine after Judy Blume’s heart; she’s acerbic, imperfect, wise in her own way, a dreamer and someone who lives in the future instead of the now. Miller is realistically messy in his own way. Their fights and their romance seem perfectly in-tune with how a high school senior will interrogate their feelings at that age. I loved Ro’s relationship with her father, as well.

I know enough about the tech world to understand that O’Clover has an ear for how things run there. The end result is perfectly cromulent without hurting the reader’s ears.

Seven Percent of Ro Devereux is a lovely little story – intriguing and romantic without being cutesy. Pick this one up for your teenager and watch them be enthralled.

Buy it at: Amazon, Audible or your local bookshop

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