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A review by marik0n
If He Had Been with Me by Laura Nowlin
emotional
lighthearted
reflective
sad
fast-paced
3.0
Reading this book led me to so conflicted feelings, so this is a big review, but it is spoiler free.
The plot: We follow the lives of Finn and Autumn two childhood friends whose mothers are best friends and live next door to each other, as they enter and go through puberty. It’s not hard to guess that they were meant to be childhood sweethearts.
The characters: We see the point from Autumn’s point of view and it’s a first-person narration. Autumn generally stroked me the wrong way from the beginning. She is a typical pick-me girl that is actually obsessed with her best friend but in a teenage drama way of ‘oh no, he would never like me back’. Autumn wears tiaras every day just because she likes them and she is edgy, different and weird, but not in a bad way (of course), she’s kind of 2015 tumblr edgy and weird. She makes it clear early on that she is not a cringey goth or hipster or nerd kind of teen, she’s just different and quirky in an eccentric and ultimately effortless, mysterious, sophisticated and I’m-not-trying-to-be-cool way. We learn all these things about Autumn early on in the book, so I wasn’t really interested in reading it.
At this point I felt determined to give up on this book. However, the thing that got me hooked from the beginning was the short and contemporary chapters. It felt like each chapter only need a minute, so I kept reading.
Around 80% done I started thinking about puberty, who girls are brought up and the pick-me phase all girls seem to experience at some point during their adolescent years. A video of a creator in TikTok came to my mind (I don’t remember her name unfortunately) that I saw a couple months ago. The creator explained how every girl goes through a pick-me phase since we are trying to establish that she is not like the others girls. You know which ones. The ones boys say that:
- They can’t think anything besides becoming wives and are obsesses with getting married
- The ones that don’t like anything besides the color pink and putting on lip gloss
- The ones you cheat on because they are boring
- The ones that do not have any ‘boyish’ interests (therefore, real, serious interests)
- The ones that seem like being the same person because they lack any element of authenticity, character and soul. They are not people. They are a stereotype and nothing more.
Of course, she expressed it a much more eloquent way and gave way more examples, but you get the idea.
I have struggled a lot with my pick me phase. Although my mom made sure that I snapped out of shortly, I still got in the rabbit hole of thinking that way. The essence of what the creator on TikTok was explaining is absolutely accurate: young girls just want to differentiate themselves from these ‘other girls’ that you treat and think poorly of.
Reading this book and taking into consideration that it is about puberty (from the eyes of a girl nonetheless) it makes a really good point. The thing that made me give this book three stars and not five is that I do not really buy it that the writer wrote it consciously as a disapprovement towards the hate and divination the pick-me attitude creates among women. I think that her purpose was writing a panic-pixie dixie girl and slightly make some criticism on the way society treats girls and women but in vague and subtle way in order not to make it ‘political’.
Whatever the case, I have to give this book credit for capturing a more or less realistic perspective on girls during puberty.
I have my doubts about Finny since we mostly see her interpretation of him and not much information about his character from another point of view. He seems like a nice guy. Idk.
This book is leaning heavily on the miscommunication trope which I also don’t enjoy. As for the ending, other than being stated in literally the first chapter, it had other tropes which I dislike a lot. The ending for itself wasn’t so painful for me as it was for others, maybe it’s because I have read of my fair share of similar books so I don’t react as badly. That certainly does not mean that I wasn’t feeling sentimental.
Overall, on the pros side we have the really short chapters and the contemporary context make it a page-turner. On the cons side this a pick-me female main character. The conception behind the book is great and the book itself has many things going for it: short chapters, capturing a realistic perspective of a girl’s puberty and contemporary content, easily relatable. Nevertheless, there was this glorification of the pick me girl that I don’t support, which pretty much was the only thing the book had against it.
No matter the disadvantages, one thing is for sure: I finished reading this book a couple days back and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.