This is so beautiful and so sad and so poignant. I loved it even if I didn’t love Ari for a long time and I really wanted to hug Josh and tell him he could do better. The window into life in New York and kitchens and comedy was wonderful, and really just showed Ari and Josh experiencing all of the messy messiness of life. This New York world (the music, the food, the Jewishness, the hookups, the friendships) is such a long way away from mine but everything in this haunting novel has resonated so beautifully. When Harry met Sally maybe, but raw and visceral and completely unsanitized.

I thoroughly recommend but only if you can embrace how incredibly untidy thirty-something life can be.

Looking forward to more from Kate Goldbeck. Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

You, Again is a well-written, clever contemporary romance that completely took me by surprise. It took me a little while to get into it as I wasn’t keen on the writing style at first, but after a few chapters I was hooked on the story of Ari and Josh.

This is a bit of an enemies-to-lovers story, although ‘enemy’ is perhaps a bit strong — I never got the impression Ari and Josh hated each other, more that they infuriated each other with their different outlooks and attitudes to life, sex, and everything inbetween. Josh is a hopeless romantic while Ari is very much a one-night-only kinda girl, with no aspirations for relationships or anything deeper. Over a period of several years, they keep meeting in the most unlikely of places, and things suddenly start leading to friendship, and perhaps something deeper… or do they?

Set in New York, reading You, Again is a great way to get to know the city and locations. I’ve never visited NYC myself, but I really enjoyed getting to see landmarks and lesser known areas that I hadn’t heard of before. It’s the perfect setting for an imperfect romance, and I can’t think of anywhere else that Ari and Josh would deign to live.

This story isn’t all happy romance and meet cutes, sometimes it’s messy and heartbreaking, and deliberately so. It perfectly shows that relationships aren’t easy and require work and sacrifice, whether they be romantic or platonic. Friendships play a big part in this tale of opposites, and how sometimes those are the connections we take for granted.

If you like your fictional romance with more obstacles and angst, then You, Again should definitely be on your list. It’s a very enjoyable, funny, realistic debut novel, and I look forward to seeing what else Kate Goldbeck writes.