Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera team up on What If It’s Us, a story that splits perspective between Arthur Seuss and Ben Alejo. Arthur is a nice Jewish boy from Georgia and in New York for the summer with his lawyer mother. Ben is a Puerto Rican Catholic boy spending his summer repeating classes with (unfortunately) his ex-boyfriend. Arthur and Ben have a nearly perfect rom-com meeting, but leave without each others names or numbers. They spend some time figuring out how to find each other and manage it through another bit of rom-com magic, but it’s there that the illusion ends. Each boy is bringing history and baggage, likes and dislikes, to the table and their first date is pretty terrible. Their second first date isn’t much better. As the boys work to make things smooth between them, outside influences threaten to make it even more difficult, and the end of the summer (and Georgia) looms.

Albertalli and Silvera have turned out an novel that impressively subvert the rom-com trope at all the right moments. Despite the novelty of the difficulty of their first date, the story took some time to get going in a way that hooks the reader. The short chapters that flip back and forth between the two boys make it difficult to build an idea of who each one is. Strangely, for a book written by two different authors together, Arthur and Ben didn’t have much in the way of distinct voices. Because of this, some of the actions sometimes feel out of character and, as a reader, it’s more difficult to accept bad behavior from the character, because it feels somewhat out of left field. It seems as though each author had to temper their individual style to write a cohesive novel, and the result was somewhere in between.

Despite these points, What If It’s Us has many great points that out weight its detractions. Positive, light-hearted fiction about two male characters falling in love is still rare, and especially one where the main characters’ parents, both demonstrably religious, are fully and freely accepting of the boys. The story does draw the reader in, though it takes a bit longer than one might like, and, by the end, the novel says a lot of important things about teenage relationships, both platonic and romantic. Recommended strongly.

Reviewed by Sarah Cropley, Scarborough Public Library.