Review of "The Scott Fenwick Diaries" by Kristin Nilsen

​Score: 95/100 (9.5 out of 10)

We LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Kristin Nilsen's writing style!

It's so in-the-moment. So unconstrained. So loose and free. So... lively, lived in, and present.

There's never a dull moment with Nilsen's writing—never a dull moment in the life and mind of Millicent "Millie" Jackson, the main protagonist of The Scott Fenwick Diaries.

Nilsen and her precocious teen protagonist return from Worldwide Crush, the Ultimate Champion of our 2025 Summer Contest and our 2025 Fiction Book of the Year!

So, they've got a lot of big shoes to fill and extremely high expectations to live up to. Thankfully, they've also got a lot of momentum to ride!

The story picks up with Millie in seventh grade, where her romantic life takes a sudden and very unexpected turn. This time, her crush isn't a world-famous pop star whose face hangs on her bedroom wall. He's a real boy. A boy who sits across from her in social studies. A boy who can look back.

His name, of course, is Scott Fenwick. After Scott passes Millie a goofy, vegetable-pun-filled note that appears to be fishing for her phone number, Millie's brain promptly goes into overdrive. Is he flirting with her? Does he actually like her? What does that look mean? Was that tiny wave meant for her? Should she give him her number? What should she write back? And, perhaps most importantly, what in the world is a girl supposed to do when a crush stops being something safely experienced through posters, magazines, and music videos and becomes an actual human being standing right in front of her?

Naturally, Millie decides that the situation requires documentation. Thus, the "Scott Fenwick Diaries" are born!

With best friend Shauna serving as adviser, a Magic 8 Ball occasionally serving as consultant, Google filling in some highly questionable gaps in Millie's romantic education, and a brand-new diary chronicling every glance, note, text, blush, outfit, and potentially significant movement of Scott Fenwick's eyelashes, Millie begins navigating her first real-life crush. And unlike Rory Calhoun, Scott can actually like her back. That's where things get complicated.

As Millie and Scott inch closer together, Millie finds herself confronting all kinds of things she never had to worry about with a celebrity crush: talking to a boy without completely malfunctioning, wondering whether another girl might be prettier or more interesting, deciding how much of herself she's ready to share, figuring out what she actually wants from a relationship, and trying not to analyze every microscopic interaction until it becomes a full-scale existential crisis.

Meanwhile, life refuses to politely step aside while Millie falls in love. Shauna has problems of her own. Millie's friendships begin changing. Her family remains as loving, embarrassing, and completely bonkers as ever. Grandma Cheryl is still Grandma Cheryl. Billy is still Billy. Pringles is still an adorable four-legged couch potato. And Great-Grandma Phyllis arrives to introduce an entirely new level of senior-citizen chaos involving Little Debbies, motorized shopping carts, "exercise jeans," unsolicited matchmaking, and a rather loose relationship with other people's patience.

Scott himself also turns out to be much more than a handsome collection of hair, freckles, eyelashes, and "coffee-colored eyes." Millie gradually discovers a shy, thoughtful boy who loves animals, plays trumpet, cares deeply about his family and Jewish faith, and possesses the courage to stand up for other people when many of his classmates remain silent.

So, while The Scott Fenwick Diaries certainly gives us a wonderfully funny first-romance story, it gradually becomes something larger.

It's about what happens when a fantasy becomes a relationship. It's about friendship when one friend suddenly becomes obsessed with somebody else. It's about jealousy, insecurity, embarrassment, family, boundaries, growing up, and the enormous difference between wondering whether somebody else thinks you're good enough and believing that you are good enough yourself.

And, thankfully, it's all filtered through the gloriously overactive mind of Millie Jackson, one of the most likable and loveable protagonists to come our way in years.

Like with the stellar previous book, the writing and characters in book two really elevate it to much higher heights than it would have otherwise reached. The characters are just so darn fun, funny, and likable.

The secret to the terrific writing is just how lively it is. There's a real sense that these characters, mainly Millie, are constantly thinking and ruminating—perhaps overthinking and overruminating, if there is such a thing. The writing is very sassy, opinionated, and sarcastic at times.

Now let's get to the characters! Last year, we praised Millie's mom and grandma, Cheryl, as some of the funniest and coolest characters ever. Cheryl was already an unfiltered loose cannon who could say anything and do anything at any moment, including flag your school bus down wearing a robe and a plastic bag on her head. Well, this book adds Phyllis into the mix. And suddenly, we understand where Cheryl gets it from.

Phyllis is Cheryl's mother, Millie's great-grandmother, and apparently the final boss of this family's multigenerational insanity.

Millie's mom goes out of her way to help her grandmother by taking her to Target for groceries, even pleading with Millie to come along because handling Phyllis alone might be a "total nightmare." Millie reluctantly agrees, already haunted by memories of a previous Target excursion in which Phyllis apparently tried to spank her own elderly daughter, Cheryl, in the self-checkout line for being sassy.

At Target, Phyllis commandeers one of the motorized scooters and takes off with Carrie and Millie practically jogging beside her. She drives directly to the snack aisle, grabs a box of Little Debbie oatmeal creme pies, and heads for checkout. That's it. Those are the "groceries."

It turns out Phyllis doesn't actually need groceries at all because she already received food from Feed Our Seniors. When Carrie points out that the program is intended for people who need help affording food, Phyllis counters that she is a senior and, at today's prices, maybe she can't afford food either. Never mind that Carrie reminds her she actually donated money to the same organization the previous Christmas.

Carrie finally realizes the horrible truth: Phyllis tricked them into taking her to Target so she could buy Little Debbies.

And when Carrie objects, Phyllis argues that she needs soft food because of her dentures. Carrie, at the end of her rope, tells her to eat Little Debbies until her teeth fall out.

Phyllis fires back that they already did. Why else would she have dentures?

Millie's mom, Carrie, is still one of the coolest parents in the series. She's warm, funny, involved without being completely overbearing, and genuinely interested in the person Millie is becoming. When Millie is hurting, Carrie notices. When Millie wants space, Carrie doesn't always understand it immediately, but she is capable of backing off. At one point, she tries to coax Millie out for a family bike ride because she suspects getting out of the house might help, but when Millie firmly says no, Carrie ultimately accepts it and leaves her alone.

Even when Millie starts establishing increasingly elaborate rules for Carrie's attendance at Scott's bar mitzvah, Carrie is willing to accommodate an almost comical number of them so her daughter can feel comfortable navigating this enormous new social experience.

That said, Carrie isn't perfect, and we actually think that makes her a better character. Her biggest misstep is the Family Showcase of Talent, where she becomes so enamored with the idea of forcing the Jackson clan into a Sound of Music performance that she doesn't initially listen when Millie repeatedly says she does not want to participate. And we can't help thinking Carrie is doing a little bit of projecting here.

She tells Millie that she has loved The Sound of Music since she was five and would have auditioned to play Maria in her own seventh-grade musical if chicken pox hadn't prevented her from doing so. She then insists that she simply doesn't want Millie to "miss out." But Millie isn't missing out on her dream. She's resisting Carrie's dream. Carrie does eventually acknowledge that the performance is fun for her but not for Millie and makes compromises, yet she still bargains Millie's participation against respecting Millie's bar-mitzvah boundaries and ultimately pushes her onto the stage when Millie tries to back out. It's a small but meaningful flaw in an otherwise wonderfully supportive mother: sometimes loving your child also means recognizing that the experience you desperately wish you'd had at thirteen may not be the experience your thirteen-year-old actually wants.

Scott Fenwick himself is another big reason the story works. It would have been easy for Nilsen to make him little more than the cute boy with the coffee-colored eyes, great hair, and eyelashes Millie spends an almost medically concerning amount of time studying. But Scott gradually proves there is something underneath all that hair and those eyelashes. He's sweet, shy, funny, loves animals, and seems genuinely kind. One of the moments that really elevates him comes when another student is cruel toward Shazi, a friendly Muslim classmate who needs additional support at school. Scott speaks up because, as he later explains, Shazi has never done anything to deserve being treated badly. His bar mitzvah gives Nilsen another opportunity to show us who Scott is beneath Millie's crush, especially when he speaks about his late dog, Precious, his volunteer work helping abused animals, and the connection he sees between how people treat vulnerable animals and vulnerable human beings. So yes, Millie is ridiculously infatuated with him, but Nilsen gives us enough evidence to understand why.

The funny thing is that while Millie is desperately wondering whether Scott notices her, another boy has been noticing Millie all along. Poor Carson. Carson is Millie's delightfully odd longtime friend, the sort of kid who says things like "good morrow," calls Millie "fair maiden," keeps a pen handy in case he needs to spontaneously write a sonnet, and considers showing up with Yahtzee an invitation to "raucous board game fun." He's eccentric, awkward, extremely smart, and increasingly obvious about having feelings for Millie. But Millie is so consumed by Scott Fenwick that Carson might as well be wearing an invisibility cloak. She repeatedly brushes him off because all she can think about is Scott.

And this is where the book becomes smarter than a simple crush story. Millie spends an enormous amount of time worrying that other people don't notice her. She worries that she's boring, unattractive, forgettable, not gifted enough, not sophisticated enough, and generally invisible next to other girls. Yet while she's obsessing over whether Scott sees her, Millie stops seeing some of the people who are right in front of her.

Shauna is the most important example. Millie's best friend spends much of the book serving as adviser, investigator, hallway scout, decoder of notes, and provider of "Fox Reports." But Shauna has problems of her own. She gets removed from the gifted math program, fails a gym test, and quietly struggles with much deeper worries about her family and identity. Shauna is half Filipino and already feels caught between worlds. At Filipino events, she sometimes feels too white, especially because her white mother is the parent who actually shows up while her Filipino father is largely absent. Around white people, she feels like the Filipino girl in the room. No matter where she goes, she can end up feeling like the "different one."

Then Shauna learns that her father is marrying a Filipino woman from California, and she becomes terrified that they may someday have what she calls "The Better Baby": a fully Filipino child who will fit perfectly into the family she fears her father really wants, leaving Shauna as his half-white daughter whom he barely sees. That's heavy stuff for a kid, and the painful part is that Millie barely notices because she's too busy thinking about Scott's hair, Scott's eyes, Scott's notes, Scott's trumpet, Scott's bar mitzvah, and approximately nine thousand other Scott-related matters.

Eventually, Shauna has had enough. She tells Millie that she has things going on too, things that may be even more important than boys, but she can't seem to squeeze them into the conversation anymore. She also points out that Carson likes Millie, and that every time Millie casually rejects another invitation to play Yahtzee or spend time together, she's hurting the feelings of a boy who has been her friend since childhood. It's one of our favorite ideas in The Scott Fenwick Diaries: Millie is so afraid of being invisible that she becomes temporarily blind. She wants desperately to be seen by Scott Fenwick while failing to see Carson's feelings and Shauna's pain, turning what could have been a simple first-crush story into something much more meaningful about friendship, insecurity, empathy, and learning to value the people who have already been there all along.

Millie really grows throughout the book and gradually learns to look beyond herself. At first, so much of her world is filtered through one question: What does Scott Fenwick think of me? But the story keeps nudging her outward. She has to pay attention to Shauna's complicated feelings about being half Filipino, Scott's Jewish faith and bar mitzvah, Shazi's experiences as a Muslim student who needs extra support, Nora as a potential friend rather than simply a romantic threat, and even Carson, whose feelings she has been overlooking completely. By the end, Millie is beginning to understand that other people are carrying around fears, identities, disappointments, hopes, and insecurities just as intense as her own.

Thankfully, that growth never comes at the expense of Millie's wonderfully chaotic stream-of-consciousness narration. Her mind still ricochets from romance to religion to Google searches to Magic 8 Ball consultations to whether Scott's hair might feel like fox fur. She can become sincerely interested in Judaism one moment and immediately admit that part of her motivation for Hebrew school is the possibility of sitting next to Scott in a carpool. That mixture of genuine curiosity, adolescent selfishness, sweetness, panic, and absurdity is exactly what makes Millie feel so alive.

One of our favorite running gags is the word "gob." It started as an accidental typo. Millie once tried to text Shauna, "GOD I HATE HER!" during an argument over black nail polish, but accidentally typed "Gob" instead. Rather than correct it, the girls decided they liked it better. As Millie explains, "gob" works just as well as "God," with the added benefit that nobody can accuse you of taking the Lord's name in vain.

From that point forward, "gob" becomes part of Millie's personal vocabulary. "Gob!" "Double Gob!" "GOBSMACKIT!" It pops up whenever she is shocked, horrified, embarrassed, romantically overwhelmed, or simply forced to eat something disappointing for dinner.

It's such a tiny joke, but it's exactly the kind of tiny joke that gives Nilsen's writing personality. By the time you're deep into The Scott Fenwick Diaries, "Oh, my gob!" no longer even looks wrong. It just sounds like Millie.

Nilsen has similar fun with the F-word, which Millie frequently replaces with the wonderfully harmless "Frank", giving us expressions like "What the Frank?", "I Franked up," and even "stupid Franking talent show!"

There's this really funny line about how, "Pringles can't run away. He's too fat."
Oh, the irony! The foreshadowing! We won't spoil it.... completely.

It's also nice to see certain things carry over from the previous book. For example, Rory Calhoun is still an icon and a major figure in the background of Millie's life. His titular song makes a pretty epic reappearance in this book in a way that doesn't seem unnatural and forced.

This book is definitely an above-average book. However, it does kinda get overshadowed and outperformed by the previous one.

One key weakness we noticed with this book is how stretch thin, fractured, fragmented, and unfocused it all feels. There's so much going on, so many moving parts. It's quite chaotic. You've got the stuff with Scott, the stuff with the Sound of Music, the two grandmas, Pringles the dog, the Jewish stuff, the Filipino stuff, the Muslim stuff, Shauna's stuff, etc. There's so much... stuff. And, yeah, that's the way life is sometimes.

All in all, this is definitely a book we enjoyed and would recommend to others who want to have a good time.

Check it out on Amazon!