Not in a bad way. I liked this book a lot.
The summary:
It’s been a year since it happened—when Paige Hancock’s first boyfriend died in an accident. After shutting out the world for a year, Paige is finally ready for a second chance at high school . . . and she has a plan. First: Get her old crush, Ryan Chase, to date her—the perfect way to convince everyone she’s back to normal. Next: Join a club—simple, it’s high school after all. But when Ryan’s sweet, nerdy cousin, Max, moves to town and recruits Paige for the Quiz Bowl team (of all things!) her perfect plan is thrown for a serious loop. Will Paige be able to face her fears and finally open herself up to the life she was meant to live?
Brimming with heartfelt relationships and authentic high-school dynamics, The Start of Me and You proves that it’s never too late for second chances.The verdict:
Which is all fucking misleading, for the record. This isn't a romcom and it's not about second chances; it's about grief, and friendship, and — if not moving on — moving forward. Second chances are a misnomer: you're constantly getting chances, small chances and big ones, and you get to decide what chances you're taking or if you're not taking any chances at all.
Also, Max doesn't recruit Paige for the Quiz Bowl team. Among other things.
I like books about romance, but, while Paige does fall in love over the course of the novel and it is a slow-blossoming beautiful thing, much like watching a rose bloom in fast-forward or watching a baby goat trip over its front legs, this book is not so much about romance as it is about love and comfort: Paige's love for her friends Tessa, Kayleigh, and Morgan is just as present as her relationship with Max, which itself starts out seeming to be entirely platonic. The entire reason why her feelings for Max are so staggering is because they become such good friends; friends are the ones who worm their way beneath your defenses. The people you love are the people with the most power to hurt you, with their words or their actions or because they leave you, because they are always leaving, the absent-at-heart Eric and Paige's absent-in-mind grandmother, Max's father, Leanne, Aaron, Aaron, Aaron. You open yourself up to people and they leave and it hurts.
This book was full of surprises: Paige loves books, loves TV, wants to be a TV writer, and that alone stacked the decks in favor of me loving her, but really the best thing about this book is the constant deluge of friendship, the reminders of how dedication is constantly reborn in debts that will never be expected to be repaid, creating a space for someone else in your life and letting them know you and letting them help you: the stupid little things or the things that keep you sane when your boyfriend is dead or your divorced parents are dating or any of life's other hardships. Paige is a girl with significant personal trauma and tragedy but she is also a girl with a phenomenal support system.
This is what friends do when you're grieving: when you get lost, they hang out with you until you find yourself again.
Max and Paige, by the way, are charming together and I am entirely sure that the Jane-Bingley parallels were intentional, given the fact that Max refers to Paige as Janie (for Jane Bennet) throughout the book: they are the sweet couple who meet and slowly become enthralled by each other, even while their louder, allegedly more noteworthy best friends, Tessa and Ryan, are circling their own complicated courtship. The particularities are different, obviously, but the broad strokes are there.
Their level of comfort with each other killed me. Sometimes you meet people like that: sometimes it's almost immediate, and it feels like once you get past the first missteps, that some inexplicable parts of you have clicked together, that you can slump into them and they'll press back.
The only problem with this book is that it made me cry near the end and then resolved everything so quickly. I don't object entirely to the dramatic romantic confessions, but both Paige and Max are still on such fragile ground, with each other and with their relationship, and I was still feeling tear-aching and unsteady from a particular event that ending things with just a kiss and a promise, essentially, felt more ephemeral than satisfying. I don't need everything to be resolved, but I would have liked a better indication of the future, some wrap-up to balance out my turbulence and soothe me back to smiling. It's not self-indulgence. It's balance, and the knowledge that a kiss immediately before a departure doesn't solve all your problems. (Trust me on this one. Trust me.)
But I liked it.
Started: April 15
Finished: April 15
The Commute: I had a hard time putting it down after the morning commute and lunchtime; the evening commute threatened to be dangerous, for facial expression reasons of both the smiling and the crying variety.
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