I feel like I can’t really even muster up enough energy to review this. It was okay, not bad. I just didn’t really enjoy it all that much. Parts of it were very cute, and then parts of it were just there. I guess I just never really felt Ben and Arthur’s connection, it was just told to me over and over again, amidst a staggering amount of dramadrama, which I do not like.
Ben is a NY native who has recently broken up with his boyfriend Hudson, and is at the post office to mail a box of his stuff back to him. Arthur is a Georgia native in NYC for the summer with his parents. He’s interning at his mother’s law firm, and on a coffee run for the office, catches sight of a cute boy and basically follows him in to the post office, where he strikes up a meet cute. Then, amidst the chaos of a genuine flash mob proposal, Ben disappears. The beginning third of the book basically focuses on both of them thinking about “what could have been” and trying to find one another.
Once they do find each other, it’s rocky. There are near constant miscommunications and one boy getting mad at the other for something they did or said unwittingly. Ben is “bad at relationships” and Arthur is intense about them (Arthur is also intense about everything). They work it out, until they don’t. There is a whole subplot with Ben not telling Arthur that he is in summer school with Hudson, and I was utterly uninterested in it.
Honestly, the best part of the book was Ben’s best friend, Dylan, who steals every scene he’s in. His relationship with Ben is adorable, he’s just so loving and accepting of Ben. They also have a believable conflict, in that Ben feels abandoned whenever Dylan gets a new girlfriend, like he’s only good to hang out with when Dylan isn’t dating, but Ben also knows that Dylan is very intense and throws himself whole hog into new crushes. His crush this time is Samantha, who is also awesome. Honestly, I’m glad I read the book just for them.
I have never before read an Adam Silvera book because I’ve heard they have unhappy endings (and honestly the synopses have never interested me). This only seems to confirm my feelings. The ending here only sort of worked for me. Albertalli’s fluff balanced it out a little, but I was definitely unhappy that after all of that SPOILERS the dang epilogue couldn’t even hint at a definite future for them, only hinting at them thinking of a possible future. It was just a lot angst for, I think, very little payoff END SPOILERS.
I’m not sure I’d recommend this, but if this is your genre (and contemporary usually isn’t mine) you might want to check it out anyway.
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