I personally love the Artemis Fowl series, because my favorite genre is fantasy. My favorite character from it is probably Holly or Mulch. Juliet is also high on my list. I think I like either the 5th book or the 2nd the most. I also enjoy The Penderwicks, Wings of Fire, and Keeper of the Lost Cities.

I've been noticing a ton of strange similarities between Love and Olives, by Jenna Evans Welch, and One Way or Another by Kara McDowell...

-Both main characters (Olive and Paige) have divorced mothers who are married to/in love with someone else.

-Both main characters travel to a new place, leaving behind their boyfriends/boys they're interested in

-Paige and Olive both have panic attacks every second. And they never enjoy the wonderful places they go to because they're worrying about unimportant things... for instance, Olive goes to GREECE, which sounds beautiful and amazing, and she just sits around tying herself up in knots over her relationship with her (very nice) father :/ It makes reading the books less enjoyable.

-Paige and Olive both end up in the hospital, where their crushes come to see them, try to have serious talks with them, and are rebuffed. After the girls are out of the hospital, they are reconciled with their crushes and everyone's happy. Honestly, those scenes are almost identical.

-Both are separated from their mothers for a long time in the story.

-Both get into conversations with friendly men on airplanes near the start of the story.

-Both have homosexual minor characters.

-Both deal lightly with the topic of taking medications for what's considered to be mental illness but is actually just personality quirks and too much tying yourself up in knots. I didn't approve much of this part of the book. In Love and Olives, for instance, the main character's father is on medication just because he can't control his temper!

-A Jenna is mentioned in One Way or Another, and Love and Olives is by Jenna Evans Welch. And Jenna's not that common a name...

-They were both published in 2020.

Another thing that romcoms in general seem to share, is that the heroines are always really whiny and unsure of themselves. It's weird because this is technically the age of "girl power", and you'd think that would mean we could have some functional heroines. I don't want them to be tough and unemotional, necessarily - that always irritates me just as much - but they can be feminine without being so egotistical and unappreciative of the good things of life, and without going into full-blown panic mode every time they're faced with a slight  change in their lives. Besides, the boys in these stories are always very calm and collected and sometimes end up saving the girls. Which is very romantic, of course - I don't mind when that happens - but it would be nice if the girls could also sometimes save themselves. That's one of the nice things about Julieta and the Romeos, by Maria E. Andreu: Julieta is very self-sufficient :)

Has anyone read Explorer Academy? dispite the thiner volumes, the series is top notch exellent. Favorite characters? Mine is definetly Emmet and Lani. Those two are so cool... great inventors. and I love how there are pictures of real places, and then they draw the people into it