ARC Review: Down With This Ship by Katie Kingman (Blog Tour)

Author: Katie Kingman

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary

Publishing Date: June 8, 2021

Content warning: Light bullying

Kole Miller does one thing really well: write fanfiction for the show The Space Game. Everything else is a struggle: like managing her anxiety, frequent crushes, and plans after high school. But when her blog, Spacer, wins a major fanfiction contest, her traffic soars.

With massive readership comes criticism Kole isn’t prepared for, including getting stuck in the heated ship wars surrounding the show. And then an invitation to speak at The Space Game’s official convention arrives in her inbox.

When the most competitive kids in her Creative Writing class discover Kole’s writing Spacer, her blog is taken hostage and she risks them hitting ctrl+A+del on Spacer. To win it back, Kole must face both her inner demons and the ones at Crystal Lake High before they make the drama not just about The Space Game, but about Kole herself.

Including snippets from Kole’s fanfic, emails, and text messages, Down With This Ship is sure to bring out the inner fangirl in anyone.

Purchase a copy: Amazon | B&N | Book Depository | IndieBound

⭐️⭐️⭐️ {3.5}

Down with this ship was a cute story about a girl who writes Fan fiction.

The MC, Kole, is a regular teen with anxiety, tress, etc and she writes fan fiction for a show called The Space Game. No one knows she’s the one who writes it, but then her blog wins a big contest and more and more people find out and she even gets an invite to speak at a convention for The Space Game. Then, a couple of kids from her creative writing class find out and take control of the blog, threatening to delete it forever and she has to go with their demands in order to win it back.

I’m 50-50 about whether I truly liked Kole or not. At times I did and she was a little relatable with her writing, anxiety, stress, school, etc but at times she wasn’t. (I found her a bit self-centered sometimes). For a contemporary book, this was a little unrealistic too, because while I know there’s lots of bullying in high school (been through some myself), the bullying shown in this book was almost ridiculous. The students weren’t shown as being teenagers who bullied others, but rather as some sort of evil villains with big agendas, which isn’t what high school bullying is like.

Now onto positive things, I liked the basic storyline/plot that this book followed and it was pretty-fast paced so made it easier to read. I liked the romance between Kole and both the love interests and, (I’m trying not to spoil it!) I would’ve been happy if she ended up with the other one too.

I liked the writing in the book and Katie captured the adorable sibling relationship between Kole and her brother very well (Makes me wish I had a brother even more than before!) The story had a little bit of everything; Fun, romance, humour, etc. and would be easy to get into for anyone and if you’ve found yourself utterly obsessed with a certain show, you’d love Kole’s story.

About the Author

Katie Kingman has wanted to be a writer since freshman year when her English teacher read her story out loud. The experience was mortifying, but it led to a lifelong love of classic literature and writing fiction. She now lives, teaches, and geeks in Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband, two kids, and five cats. When not writing, she can be found gardening and scrolling Netflix for a new OTP.