Book Review: Because You Love to Hate Me

TITLE: Because You Love to Hate Me
AUTHOR: Various
PUBLISHED: July 11th, 2017
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Fantasy
PREMISE: A bunch of popular YA authors write stories featuring villains based on prompts given to them by popular Booktubers.
MY REVIEW: If you're part of the YA community, you've likely heard about this one. There's a big stink (yes, another one!) being raised because apparently people don't like Booktubers getting involved with this for whatever reason. A majority of it being, they just don't like Booktubers. For those that don't know what Booktube is, it's basically the corner of Youtube where people just talk about the books they read. For more context: some people think Booktubers are too involved with publishers are lying to them for...reasons, I guess (no one seems to know what exactly they're lying to us about...), and so on and so forth.
Me...I watch Booktube, I won't lie. Including some of the people involved with this book. I...have issues with it (it's too YA focused, there needs to be more variety in the reviewers/books talked about, the way they handle issues within the community leaves a lot to be desired, there's too much snobbery towards certain things, etc. etc). But I also kind of can't help but notice the people complaining about Booktube don't have any actual evidence of any wrong doing in the community, it mostly just seems to be people who are salty their own Booktube channel didn't take off overnight or whatever. So yeah...I've got issues, but I also think this idea that they somehow are doing something bad....is a little ridiculous.
Now, onto the book itself. It was...okay. It's like most short story collections: some are better then others. Some, I think calling them villain stories is....stretching it  to say the least. But there are some really interesting ones in here. For me, the favorites were the ones by Renee Ahdieh, Cindy Pon, and Victoria Schwab. The rest were all a little meh for me. I think I honestly liked the concept of this book more then the actual book itself. Because I love the whole practice of just taking a prompt and running with it. It's always so interesting to see what authors come up with.
WHO SHOULD READ: YA fans, Retelling fans, Once Upon a Time fans
MY RATING: Three and a half out of Five