Review: Seven Percent of Ro Devereux by Ellen O’Clover

Remember the game Mansion Apartment Shack House (MASH)? It’s a fun kids game that tells you your future. For her senior project, Ro Devereux decided to create an app version of the popular children’s game that can predict your future with 93% accuracy.

With the help of her family friend Vera, a behavioral scientist, Ro was able to ask participants the right questions, while handling the coding side.

Ro never planned on her app becoming big. She just wanted to create it to prove to her dad that she doesn’t need college because she’s ready to start her career out of high school. But when Ro’s influencer cousin promotes online, MASH starts getting hundreds of thousands of downloads.

It’s becoming so big that XLR8, a startup accelerator that’s part of the venture capital process, asks Ro to sign with them. Their goal was to provide the seed money, work on marketing and edit the code. Eventually, the goal was to get a venture capital firm behind MASH.

Even though her dad warns her against it, Ro decides to sign on to the project. However, the team is ready to get the perfect match section up and running. To do this, Ro is going to find her perfect guy live to show the world that it actually works.

She thinks that won’t be too big of a deal. But when Ro matches with her former best friend/current nemesis Alistair Miller, she has no idea how she could pull off fake dating him. In exchange for fake dating Ro, Miller asks that XLR8 pays for his college.

Now Ro is spending her senior year trying to start her career in the tech industry, while having to fake date Miller in public. Part of the deal is to post photos and go on dates a few times a week. But the more time they spend together, the more they start to rehash the past.

Ro starts to wonder if they could ever be friends again or maybe even something more. Just as she wants to make up with Miller, an article criticizing MASH releases, leading Ro to question XLR8.

If Ro wants to take charge of her future, she has some decisions to make, ones that determine what happens to MASH, her love life and what she does after graduation.

Seven Percent of Ro Devereux brought back the fun nostalgia of playing MASH as a kid. Where would you live? Who would you marry? Would you have kids or pets? The book was about how Ro took that game and tried to predict your future based on a set of behavioral questions.

Honestly, this app would probably do really well in real life. We could see many people of all ages play it for different reasons. Some would want to learn about their future, while others would want to just take it for fun.

The thing about Seven Percent of Ro Devereux is that all the participants treat their prediction as fact and not as an option. That was one aspect of the book that we struggled with. While XLR8 did advertise the app as 100% accurate (Ro believes that it’s 93% accurate), we did find it hard to believe that everyone would take it so seriously.

Besides that point, we found ourselves really enjoying the book. Ro is a great character and we really enjoyed getting to know her. She’s smart, clever and truly cares about the people in her life. She’s also very ambitious, which is seen from her desire to be successful in the tech industry.

Miller was also a cool character and definitely someone we would have been friends with. Our favorite thing about Miller was that he’s always himself and doesn’t care what other people think about him.

Ro and Miller had great chemistry. It slightly reminded us of Jenn Bennett’s Starry Eyes, with the friends to hate to love trope. The reader could tell that they missed each other, they just had some stuff from the past to work out. There were some really cute scenes between them, especially when they travel from Colorado to New York City for publicity events.

Miller ended up being so sweet and supportive of Ro when she made some big decisions near the end of the book. Even though their post-high school futures were left a little up in the air, we knew that they would be together.

The supporting characters were all great as well, especially Maren, who was Ro’s best friend. Maren served as the voice of reason through this whole process. We enjoyed watching her love story play out as well, which wasn’t through the app.

Lastly, we enjoyed the ending overall, even if we might’ve done things differently when it came to MASH. We’re curious, if you’ve read Seven Percent of Ro Devereux, would you have changed anything?

Overall, we had fun reading this creative story about a high school girl becoming a big name in tech almost overnight. We highly recommend it and it’s a great debut novel. We’re curious to see what O’Clover writes next.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐/⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐