We Can’t Keep Meeting Like This by Rachel Lynn Solomon
We Can’t Keep Meeting Like This releases 6.1.21!!
This book encapsulates the stress of figuring out who you are after the point when the world tells you that you should already know; the stress of being a teenager, working for your parents, figuring out your dreams, and what love feels like.
Quinn just graduated high school and is still on the path to become a wedding planner with the rest of her family. Her crush from last summer, Tarek, is back from his first year at college and their pull towards each other is undeniable. But Quinn is constantly confronted by the constraints on her life and her lack of knowledge about, well, most everything. So she starts doing things for herself to see where that leads her, to find her happiness.
Rachel Lynn Solomon ticks all the good contemporary YA boxes for me:
✅Character perspectives that differ from my own - Quinn and her family are Jewish, with different levels and connections to Judaism. Tarek is Egyptian American and Muslim.
✅Character living with (and normalizing) something - Quinn has OCD/Anxiety and Tarek experiences depression.
✅Animals - Lady Edith Clawley, a cat
✅Excellent food - now I need to find and try zalabya!
✅Unique summer jobs - wedding planner! (As someone who has wedding planned a few weddings, all of this element was spot on), and
✅Confronting parents about their blind spots and having adult conversations with them.
This is another great story from a wonderful writer with a lovely voice and perspective. -Ford
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There is a lot to like about this book, even some parts to love:
Sex-positivity for high schoolers. Diverse characters with backgrounds, sexual preferences, and religious upbringings. Normalizing mental health and its meaningful and necessary presence in our lives. Parents not being the perfect demi-gods we place on pedestals as children. (I believe in this one with my whole being). All of these are great and important and handled in a lovely way.
I liked Tarek for a variety of reasons, he is sensitive and open, and he puts her needs and emotional well-being before his own quite a few times. He likes “non-traditionally masculine things,” which I wish were not a bonus point, but that isn’t a character flaw of his, as it is a societal flaw to assign meaning when there is none.
I didn’t find Quinn compelling. I found the storyline about a person with OCD important to read. I also believe that younger audiences benefit from reading stories that validate their choice not to know at eighteen how to spend the rest of their lives. There is so much pressure placed on us to have all the answers all of the time, it’s nice to have a lead not know.
And yet this story didn’t draw me in. I floated in and out of it. I’ve come to expect to be submerged into a Rachel Lynn Solomon world and this one didn’t grab me. Didn’t pull me in so completely, that I had no choice but to keep reading.
You should still read it. Maybe it will make you long for Seattle summers or orgasmic wedding cake or the summer after high school, maybe it won’t. But you should still try and let me know how you felt because your feelings are valid and you should always share them. -Sky
