What If It's Us by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera

“I don’t know if we’re in a love story or a story about love.”

Rating

Review

I'm not much of a contemporary Young Adult reader - or much of a Contemporary reader at all. With that said, I have a strong adoration of Becky Albertalli and I am almost always on board with reading a book when it focuses on an LGBTQ+ character. When this book was announced I was a smidgen annoyed because I'd found myself not enjoying Adam Silvera's writing, but I have 5 contemporary YA books in physical copies and three of them are Becky's, so there was no "maybe I'll get this" - I needed to read it. So, it was really hard for me to dislike this book; it took its toll on me emotionally to not emphatically love a Becky book. The truth is, however, that this didn't feel like a Becky book, and while I know that is the intention of a co-author project, I found that the elements that make me love an Albertalli work were absent here and this book much more closely resembled an Adam Silvera novel.

Now, aside from that disappointment, I had a fair amount of issues with the lack of chemistry between the two characters, each written by their own author (Adam is Ben and Becky writes Arthur), who seem at most to be written at constant odds with their instincts when it comes to each other. There are a lot of hugely dramatic miscommunications throughout the novel that are sit near the top of my pet peeves list (when your plot hinges on two characters simply not understanding each other while we, the readers, know both POVs, it always feels frustrating and lazy to me instead of a developed plot) and for the length of the novel it feels like not much real development happens because, well, it doesn't. At the close of the story they've had their summer tale but the journeys of each character seems to be "they're both a little more outgoing now" without seeing anything solid form from our time spent reading.

There is one instance that I can chalk up to a real learning moment for one of the characters, again involving Ben learning to communicate better instead of frustrating the reader for 200 pages, but for the most part it was a bunch of restarts that led to a climax that wasn't as satisfying as it would have been if the characters were more likeable and less... insistent on taking the easy plot choice for tension. What we're left with doesn't feel like a love story or even a story about love, it feels more akin to a story that aims for an emotional connection but, due to the lack of character chemistry and the prose that gets lost in two competing voices, doesn't give the reader anything satisfying. This book felt like the sputtering engine of an old car rather than a cute romance, the mechanical bits of plot rolling over and over while we pray endlessly for something to ignite - before accepting that we just have to call a tow truck and start fresh with a new book to hopefully get us where we need to go.