These YA romances explore the possibilities that happen between high school and what comes next.
I Loved You In Another Life by David Arnold.
Aimless teenagers Shosh and Evan are inexplicably brought together by a song only they can hear. As Shosh and Evan’s story unfolds, we get vignettes of other soulmates meeting across time due to a similar mysterious force. Evan is an introspective anxious artist who has had to become the ‘man’ of his house. Evan is a little in awe that he and Shosh, his high school’s former theatre queen, are involved in this mystery together
I feel like this could have easily become a manic pixie dream girl situation, but Shosh is given a full personality and comes across as the better developed character. Shosh gave up her acting dreams and began abusing alcohol after the sudden death of her sister.
I do feel like this book needed to bake a little more. I don’t think I really ‘got’ the connection between the other soulmates and Shosh and Evan. Arnold created two interesting characters but I’m not sure if this was the story for them. I sort of feel like Arnold wanted this to be Evan’s story because Evan’s POV is presented in the first person and Shosh’s is in the third-person. Evan’s POV goes really hard with the purple prose which was a times too navel-gazey for me.
Tilly in Technicolor by Mazey Eddings
Tilly In Technicolor is a breezy, neurodivergent YA romance that is all vibes. Tilly is tired of everyone trying to manage her ADHD and hopes to gain some independence while spending the summer on a European cross-continental business trip with her sister’s beauty start-up.
Joining the trip is Oliver, a successful Instagrammer and brilliant color theorist with autism. There is an instant physical attraction between Tilly and Oliver but the pair quickly find themselves at odds until they open up and discover how each other’s brains work.
My critical takeaway is that the characters don’t really work for their HEA. There are no stakes. There is no growth.
Tilly has the most amount of change in this story but it wasn’t enough for the story to feel developed. She starts the book with no job prospects and a desire to write. She ends with book with a writing job… but it sort of falls into her lap. Honestly, I’m not sure why Oliver even has a POV. Except for meeting Tilly, nothing about his life, personality, or goals has changed by the end of the book. He starts and ends the book in the exact same place. I would have liked a little more coming-of-age.
