Book Review: Now and When
Rating: ★★★½☆
Blurb: Skyler Finch hates everything about Truman Alexander, pretentious debate geek and her sworn enemy. She does her best to avoid him and focus on the important stuff: friends, school, and her perfect boyfriend. They’re all wonderful, and the future is looking bright. Or is it?
For some unexplainable reason, Skyler's phone is sending her notifications from the future . . . a future in which, to her horror, she appears to be with Truman. She can’t let that happen. But trying to change the future means messing with the present, and what Skyler sees keeps shifting. Forced to work with Truman again and again, Skyler finds that people—like glitchy phones—are full of surprises.
I have mixed feelings. I ended up liking this book, but I'm not quite sure it was worth it the frustration. This is just, at its heart, a frustrating book.
The main character is like "I can't believe I'm so drawn to this guy who's not my boyfriend! Maybe me and my boyfriend aren't as good together as I thought. Maybe I really like this other guy." And you're like, "So you can hold off kissing the new guy until you've dealt with the boyfriend situation, right?" And she's like "Oh no I absolutely cannot. That's a no go. I will be kissing him now." And you're like "That's what I thought you'd say, you typical YA high school plot."
Despite how much I dislike the "cheating out of sheer inability to resist this other person" trope, I think the book handles it pretty well. You can feel Skyler's guilt, and you get the sense of her relationship going downhill even before anybody else gets involved. It's not a great plot line to me and I enjoyed it more once that drama had been resolved, but I don't think it's badly written.
Truman himself is convincingly dislikable when necessary without being an asshole, which is kind of outstanding—so often "enemies to lovers" books have a love interest who was truly cruel to the main character and treat it as a quirky "they are equally to blame!" situation. This isn't that. This book is like hey, they both have reasons to think the other one is aggravating and mean, but neither of them have ever tried to assault, humiliate, or otherwise ruin the other's life. And I'm like cool, I can deal. I am also very inclined toward this kind of "love arguing with this person so much that I might just have to kiss them about it" dynamic, so that’s fun.
I like how the future social media aspect was handled. For example, how the stuff Skyler can see goes beyond instagram to linked webpages, and that how well those webpages are organized and maintained says as much about the future as the photos on them.
I am also always here for complex female friendships! Skyler is often motivated by what her friends want and what she thinks they need, which is a cool part of the book, and one I don’t see a whole lot. But I also had some issues here.
Skyler’s friend Harper gets a decent amount of development and is pretty compelling—she's dealing with depression, recovering from self harm, trying to go back to normal life while everyone else can't stop walking on egg shells around her. She gets to be three-dimensional, sweet and determined and sad and tired. Their friend Jordan, on the other hand, isn't as developed, and I feel like there was a dropped plot line here. Her and Skyler's friction, partly driven by their different ways of coping with Harper's self harm that happened before the book began, seems like it must be driven by more than that, because she gets annoyed by things about Skyler that are completely unrelated. For that reason, I feel like they needed more conflict resolution than the scene about all three of them, because I think there was more, between just her and Skyler, that needed to be addressed.
I look back on the book with much more good to say than bad, but it was just not the most enjoyable reading experience for me.
