When he suffers a blow to the head, Luis ends up back in the 80s, at his same high school… except both his parents are students alongside him! Desperate to find a way back home, Luis also tries to find out what happened to past student Chaz, the guy who is apparently the reason why Luis’ ‘liberal’ school won’t allow same sex couples to prom.

I really enjoyed the time travel aspect of this book, including the 80s references and parallels to the present day storyline of Luis’ life.

The story was light hearted and fun but also focused on topics such as homophobia and the instances of same sex couples still fighting for equality in ‘progressive’ spaces.

Luis was a bit of an annoying and self centred character, but the story still moved quickly and I enjoyed the experience of reading this book.

<i>Spin Me Right Round</i> is a fun, queer take on Back to the Future.

The book is told from the perspective of Luis Gonzales, a modern teenager who starts the book self-absorbed and finishes it slightly less so. He’s thrown back in time to his parent’s prom, and takes it upon himself to help a student who was rumoured to have been gay and died myteriously as a result – his mother’s source of anxiety about Luis being openly gay. It features a sweet assortment of characters and covers issues from the obvious homophobia to teacher-student relationships and toxic masculinity. It’s also a funny read, with lots of sweet moments, and a hopeful happy ending. Whilst its general message pushing for LGBTQ+ people to be out and proud at nearly all costs has questionable moments, generally as a book it is a funny queer story which younger YA readers will love.

I mostly liked this - it's a good idea - but I think it would have benefited from more focus on the LGBTQ characters rather than Luis' parents, teacher, friends - it was probably too much for one book and took the emotion and urgency out of the coming out story

This book was intriguing from the synopsis, but failed to deliver.

I liked how there's a diverse set of characters, it's always a plus in my books. But the lack of personality and the weird dialogue is not how teenagers speak nowadays, and it shows. I found the main character to be annoying and it made me not want to finish this book. The writing was okay, but the pacing felt off near the middle, and I had to take a break from it.

Overall, it wasn't as good as the synopsis offered. Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for an e-arc.

Spin Me Right Round had such great potential - a cast full of queer and POC rep, with a very cool time travel concept, I had really high hopes. Unfortunately, it fell way far of my expectations. Our main character, Luis, is one of the most insufferable characters I have come across. He was unbelievably selfish all the time, and there were never any consequences for it, nobody ever brought it up? He seemed to believe that he had it worse than anyone around him, when that was very clearly NOT true. He <spoiler>cheats on his boyfriend, and just for the sake of it? Right before kissing another boy, he is thinking about how much he loves his boyfriend and how he doesn't want to kiss anyone else, but then he just does it anyway? And when he tells his boyfriend, Cheng just says "okay"?</spoiler> He has time travelled to the 1980s, and being completely unaware of any consequences that time travel might have, he still continues to slip up on 2020s references ALL. THE. TIME. and nobody notices?

Luis' goal while he is time travelling is to save a student who died in the 1980s. I understand what he was trying to do, in encouraging this student to come out, and embrace who he is. But let's consider that when Luis is trying to save this person's life, despite having no knowledge of whether this person died by their own hand or by the hands of bullies, was it really the best idea to push and push and push this person to come out? In a heavily religious Christian school in the 1980s? Luis also has no plan to save this person's life, but just lucks into it, despite the fact that he is putting the person into even more danger? It felt so forcing, and it really really made me dislike Luis.

It is also painfully clear that the author has not come across a teenager in a very long time, because this was one of the most stereotypical and cringeworthy portrayals of a teenager that I've seen. No teenager acts like this one did. Luis' aspiration in life is to be an influencer. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure some people might want that but I mean, really? Could the author not have come with something a bit better? I also found it very frustrating that Luis somehow doesn't know hardly any 80s songs, especially Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics. Maybe that's just me, but I'm pretty sure everyone knows that song, right? Also, there were so many unnecessary uses of "like", "tbh" and "omg" - I felt like I was reading a text, not a novel.

I really Really wanted to love this... the premise interested me straight away (plus the gorgeous front cover) and a lot of the characters were fab and had great potential, unfortunately that was all overshadowed for me by the insufferable main character.

I'm not against antiheroes or unlikeable protagonists in general but my problem with Luis is that his personality flaws aren't part of any character development or plot device and he certainly doesn't over come any of them. He really only reflects on his behaviour for a couple of sentences about 90% of the way through, which wasn't enough for me to forgive him for how selfish, judgmental or manipulative he had been throughout the story.

However, despite my personal opinions on Luis, I do think there's a lot of positive things about this book and that it would be a perfect and fun read for a lot of people out there.

Thank you NetGalley and Bloomsbury YA for providing me with a free digital copy in exchange for an honest review

Really enjoyed this. Was actually really refreshing to have a super confident, sassy queer MC. Even though at times over confident, Luis was a really likeable and fun character.
Loved his journey of developing understanding of the difficulties of queer people in the past. The time travel has no real explanation but that’s all part of the fun.
There are few heavy moments of homophobia and the threat of violence but, overall it’s a really hopeful tale. This is more of a friendship story than a romance and it was lovely to read. Would make a fabulous film!
*slight spoiler* My only real complaint was I kind of wanted to see Luis reunited with Ernie and Chaz. Would have looooved to have seen that at the end!

This was a typical time slip story, similar to back to the future but much more diverse. A fun read with more darkness than I expected.

This is a quick, easy, fun and funny read. It was well written with a good storyline and well developed characters. I liked the back to the future elements and I laughed out lousd several times whilst reading this book. I really wanted to be in the pages with the characters. I really enjoyed it.