”She remained in bed, feeling every part of her great loss: her home, her career, the life she'd rebuilt for herself over seven years-all gone in a matter of weeks. Sleeping or waking, she was constantly buffeted by memories.”

This was an interesting read for me.

I really liked the synopsis, so even though cutesy slice of life stories aren’t my absolute favorite genre I had confidence in this one. I was partially right; it was a comforting, relaxing read that I didn’t have to worry about. I knew that in the end Maya and Ant would be okay, no matter what conspired. That’s partly why I like these cute contemporary stories a majority of the time: they don’t stress me out! It’s almost like the book equivalent of a sit-com.

What made this book stand out though, was the real time setting. This book was meant to take place in the year 2021, during the height of Covid for a lot of people, especially those in the USA. I haven’t read any other novels that so boldly embraced the Covid timeline; most recently published books I’ve read seem to have fully immersed themselves in an alternate reality where Covid was never a thing. Neither are a bad thing, it’s simply an observation. But it was something that made me want to check this story out.

This isn’t criticism either, but I find that in many contemporary fiction (especially those with romance in them, targeted towards a young adult audience) novels written by a minority, when it comes to cultural things we often have to over-explain ourselves. Because to pander to a wider audience, or perhaps just for the ease of the reader, we can’t make references if we aren’t sure people will get it. This sort of over-explanation often feels suffocating too, like when someone doesn’t get a joke so it has to be explained aloud and it sort of loses its humor. I’m not saying that this book felt preachy in any way, it’s an observation across several books I’ve read. If anything, this book did a better job than most at having great, fluid transitions between “explanations” and references.

The characters themselves gave me mixed emotions too. While I really liked Maya and Ant in the beginning of the book, I started liking them less as the story went on. I’m not sure why, but they started becoming way more annoying as the story progressed, especially when they started making digs at Gen Z and younger people. It just came out of nowhere and kind of destroyed the two characters I was starting to like.

Something else that gave me mixed emotions was the actual structure of the book. The chapters have alternating perspectives, between Maya and Ant. While I could have appreciated this flip-flop style, it just didn’t feel well-done. Maya and Ant’s voices seemed to blend together a lot when it came to their internal dialogue, and I felt like the same story could have occurred if we had a point of view from one character throughout the whole book.

One note though, this might be genius if it was intended for them to sound similar—when Ant and Maya get into that big fight, people mention (especially to Ant) that they need to make new friends and stop relying so much on each other because it’s starting to sound like a co-dependent relationship. If they’re so co-dependent that even their narration sounds alike, that’s some genius writing. If not, then… it’s not my favorite and I wish the story could have stuck to just one perspective. I feel like I could have gotten into the story much quicker if this were the case too; it took me about 100 pages to get with it.

Something that I did really appreciate in this writing though, was when Maya mentioned hating pining and lack of communication in K-Dramas and TV. And then she and Ant proceed to do something so wonderful and actually communicate and talk to each other like people should do. It was a really sly and well-placed dig at romance novels and other main characters, and I appreciated this a lot. It really highlighted Maya and Ant’s actions too, when it came to it.

Lastly, this is just me being nit-picky, but I thought that the texting format was annoying and unnecessary. It was hard to read through (maybe it was just like that on the e-copy though?) and I wished it was just formatted normally.

This was a fun summery (okay, summery until the latter half of the book) read, and I really enjoyed this book. It was really easy to see Maya and Ant as real people, and it felt realistic, quirky, and fun. This is how slice of life should be done.

Thank you to Netgalley, Montlake, and Eden Appiah-Kubi for the ARC!