It’s not often that an author’s debut novel becomes the centerpiece of BookTok drama months before release — but social media influencer Haley Pham’s book “Just Friends” did exactly that.
Pham, who has over 7.8 million followers across platforms, first announced her intentions to write a book in a TikTok post in July 2024, and later revealed that her novel was being published by the high-profile publishing house Atria Books.
In the book industry, it is unusual for a debut author to have their first novel published right away — aspiring authors often spend years searching for a publisher, or go through multiple manuscripts before one finally lands. Because of this, Pham received harsh criticism online, with many claiming she was favored for her large social media following rather than the quality of her book. Many readers who were able to get their hands on pre-release copies posted reviews of the book, few of which were positive, reinforcing anger among the book community.
Her novel was finally released on March 3, 2026. As I read the book, I tried to form my own opinion separate from the abundance of pre-existing negative reviews. Here are my unfiltered, slightly-spoiler-ridden thoughts.
Plot
“Just Friends” follows the story of Blair and Declan, two childhood best friends who began dating in their senior year of high school, only to break up before attending separate colleges. The novel takes place four years later, when Blair has just graduated and moves back to her hometown for the summer to say goodbye to her dying great-aunt Lottie. As she is back in the fictional town of Seabrook, she applies for a barista job at a local coffee shop, only to find out the owner is Declan, whom she hasn’t spoken to since their breakup. The book follows a dual timeline, recounting their past relationship and now narrating their rekindling connection. Pham explores Blair’s emotional conflict as she navigates her grief for Lottie while simultaneously reviving her relationship with Declan.
The story is a standard second-chance romance. Blair and Declan start off rocky, both assuming the other still resents them for the past, only to find out they were both secretly longing for each other the entire time. For the most part, I had no issues with the plot; however, one storyline that threw me off was Blair’s relationship with her best friends from college, Roshi and Faye. After they all graduate and go their separate ways, Blair describes the gradual falling out amongst their trio: their group chat messages become shorter and less frequent, and Blair explicitly expresses the internalized resentment she feels over the fact that neither of them called after Lottie’s death.
At the peak of conflict in the story, when Blair is overwhelmed by her ever-present grief and complications in her relationship with Declan, she texts Roshi and Faye that she is “in crisis,” and they both drop everything and fly to Seabrook for the weekend. This two-day visit magically cures all of the bubbling issues in their friendship, and Blair never confronts them about their negligence of her grief. This seemed to send a sour, tainted message of conflict resolution in friendship — rather than openly communicating her resentment, Blair internalizes her anger until her friends give her one grand gesture, kind enough to allow her feelings to dissipate silently.
Characters
It feels like Pham modeled Blair, the Vietnamese-American aspiring romance novelist, primarily off of herself. Typically, there is enough separation between the reader and the author that the reader might not even realize a character is a self-insertion, and even if they do, it does not impact their reading experience. But because Pham has so much of her life documented online, it was difficult to create a separation between Blair and Pham. While reading, I could not shake the visual in my mind of Blair as Pham and Declan as Ryan Trahan, Pham’s husband (and it didn’t help that Declan’s shaggy, dirty-blonde hair and tall, athletic build conveniently matched that of Trahan’s). I found myself annoyed at small details about Blair that matched up with things Pham has said online — like Blair and Pham’s shared fear of telling people that they’re writing a novel, or their shared love for big words — making the book almost feel like a watered-down celebrity memoir rather than a fictional romance novel.
Isolating Blair as a character herself, I noticed her character growth is primarily centered around processing her grief for Lottie. Blair’s grieving process was a potential area for the novel to become deeper and more emotional, but the depiction of grief felt somewhat surface-level. At some point, she pushes Declan away because she thinks she is not ready to navigate a relationship while she is still grieving, but this is solved by a couple of simple, halfway-sentimental conversations.
Blair is practically the only character we know enough about to say anything meaningful. The reader hardly gets any insight into Declan’s character, other than the fact that he’s head-over-heels in love with Blair. The dual timeline between him as a star football player in the past and him as a coffee shop owner now seemed like an opportunity to display some degree of character development, but it falls short as the present timeline seems to illustrate essentially the same character four years later, minus the football helmet and shoulder pads.
Writing
Pham’s writing is hit-or-miss, often feeling clunky and fragmented. Her words rarely flow for longer than a few pages, often hiccupping over out-of-place words. The novel reads at an eighth-grade level, but randomly incorporates words so obscure — such as “cataclysmatic,” “saccharinely” and “insouciance” — that my Kindle’s word search feature couldn’t even find a Wikipedia definition for them. This disruption does not just exist in her use of large vocabulary words: sentences such as “I chuckle to distill the potency of that confession” and “my mom’s offhand advice burrowed into my hardwiring” read as if she had Google searched “synonyms for [blank]” multiple times for a single clause.
While the novel could have gone through a few more rounds of editing — perhaps even read out loud to identify strangely-worded phrases — there were still some quote-worthy moments where her talent as a writer shone through. When she omits the seemingly thesaurus-sourced words from her writing, it flows beautifully:
“At first, the kiss feels like an apology. Then it morphs into a promise. Some are languid, mourning for lost time. Some are impatient for the future we’ve pictured since we were kids. We pause, laugh a little, with relief and realization that this is not our last kiss. But the first of the rest of our lifetime (303).”
Besides the integration of her extensive vocabulary, another issue I had with the writing was Pham’s evident lack of trust in the reader. While reading, I felt like Pham was practically reaching through my Kindle to hold my hand, guiding me through an analysis of each action her characters did. Every time Blair projected her grief onto a situation, it was clear enough from her dialogue alone, but Pham still spelled it out through Blair’s narration each time. Although the story is told from Blair’s perspective, this self-awareness can be shown in a more creative way than having Blair essentially analyze her own character through her internal monologue.
Conclusion
My overall rating of “Just Friends” is three stars — Pham’s debut novel is a cute, quick read (and definitely gets brownie points for the adorable doodles at the start of each chapter), but the clunky writing and forgettable plot made it difficult to love. If you’re not looking for anything life-changing, but just a cute, easy spring break read, consider picking up this book and forming your own opinion.
While discussing “Just friends,” it is important to remember that most high-quality debut novels are typically not a writer’s first attempt at writing a novel, and even if they are, they typically do not reach publication in just two years. While it is likely that Pham’s book was favored by publishers due to her large social media presence, even if it was picked up by a publisher based on quality alone, she would still likely be criticized by the media for being favored as a content creator. Putting multiple years worth of work out to the public is not an easy feat, and the pre-release controversy likely did not make it any easier — but Pham took the leap of faith to write, a leap that not many aspiring authors will ever take in their lifetime.