A review by colleens_conclusions
Our Year of Maybe by Rachel Lynn Solomon

5.0

I need to point out the fact that I am not sure when I am supposed to post this review. I signed up for the blog tour, but my name isn’t on the schedule and I got approved for the Netgalley book anyway. So I decided to just post on my chosen date just in case even though I’m not officially on the tour. I just like meeting deadlines when I’m supposed to.

Now that I have that out of the way…let’s all go back to admire that cover. Isn’t that cover simply stunning? It may have been one of the reasons why I had wanted to read this book in the first place, as well as the plot. I love beautiful book covers and that alone makes the book be rated highly. I can’t rate a book alone on just the cover because that’s not the point of a review.

This thought may seem a little bit redundant now from me, but I had no way of knowing which way this book was going to go for me. I honestly wanted to DNF the book based on the prologue alone because it was a sex pact and I was just like… woah. We don’t know anything about these characters and they are making a vow to be each other’s first when the timing is right? Uh….. am I the only one not ok with that? But I reminded myself that a prologue is a prologue, it takes place way before the story starts so I had to keep telling myself that in order to get over that huge warning misgiving it kept giving me.

I was able to get through the next few chapters since they weren’t like that, we were able to get more of the friendship between Peter and Sophie. One major thing I did not like about this book is how Sophie seemed to be dependent on Peter, even though there was a reason why she was. For example, I didn’t like how she didn’t always try new things or make new friends because she was too worried about Peter and his health and seemed to put her life on hold for his. She basically was willing to do anything for him to take his pain away. That part I was ok with since they were best friends, but it was dependent thing I wasn’t ok with.

Then there was the fact that she thought she could try to use something that happened to her in order to get what she wanted out of their friendship in order to make it be more.

I was able to let those things go (mostly) because teenagers aren’t perfect and it’s unfair to expect teenager characters to be perfect.

This story was a 4.5 out of five stars and I rounded up to five on Goodreads. It was written well, with just those things as some misgivings. I liked the friendship aside and this book was actually pretty emotional. I didn’t cry, but I’d say there could probably be some trigger warnings for health and sexuality stuff. I’d recommend this for the older high school students. I was glad I was given the chance to read this book. Thank you Netgalley and the publishers for giving me the chance to read this book!