Author: Rachel Lynn Solomon
Genre: YA Contemporary
Release Date: 06.08.21
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Source: Physical ARC via publisher
My Rating: 5/5 stars
SYNOPSIS: “Quinn Berkowitz and Tarek Mansour’s families have been in business together for years: Quinn’s parents are wedding planners, and Tarek’s own a catering company. At the end of last summer, Quinn confessed her crush on him in the form of a rambling email—and then he left for college without a response.
Quinn has been dreading seeing him again almost as much as she dreads another summer playing the harp for her parents’ weddings. When he shows up at the first wedding of the summer, looking cuter than ever after a year apart, they clash immediately. Tarek’s always loved the grand gestures in weddings—the flashier, the better—while Quinn can’t see them as anything but fake. Even as they can’t seem to have one civil conversation, Quinn’s thrown together with Tarek wedding after wedding, from performing a daring cake rescue to filling in for a missing bridesmaid and groomsman.
Quinn can’t deny her feelings for him are still there, especially after she learns the truth about his silence, opens up about her own fears, and begins learning the art of harp-making from an enigmatic teacher.
Maybe love isn’t the enemy after all—and maybe allowing herself to fall is the most honest thing Quinn’s ever done.”
After I read Today Tonight Tomorrow by Rachel Lynn Solomon last year I have been *hooked*. Pretty much the moment I learned about her most recent release, We Can’t Keep Meeting Like This, I knew I was going to love it. This book was fun, emotional, and featured a Summer full of wedding planning and swoony romance. I feel like I could gush about my love for this story for days upon days. However, I’ll do my best to convey all the love I have for this story and author within this post.
First of all, I ADORED the characters. Rachel Lynn Solomon has such an incredible talent for writing realistic characters. Quinn and Tarek were flawed characters with unique interests and traits that made them distinct, relatable, and realistic. They’re beautifully written and definitely characters that will stick with me for a long time. I loved Tarek’s love for grand gestures, Quinn’s animal printed clothing, and the character development that occurred so incredibly for both of them. We Can’t Keep Meeting Like This succeeds in having characters that I would consider perfectly crafted. Within the cast of characters there was fantastic representation as well. For example, there was Jewish representation, depression representation, and OCD representation, which the author further discussed on her social media here.
This book also made me an emotional wreck. This author portrays emotions in a way that never fails to make me sob my eyes out. To keep things simple, here are a few of the aspects of this book that emotionally gut-punched me (without giving too much away):
- Quinn’s family dynamic and her personal growth related to her family’s business.
- Quinn and Tarek’s complicated relationship history
- The climax of this book had NO RIGHT to break my heart like that (and then put it back together)
- The amazing descriptions of desserts that made me want cake every five pages
Like I said earlier, I could truly gush about this book for days. There are sooo many specific moments and aspects of this book that I want to pour all my feelings out about… However, I don’t want to give too much away. I highly recommend this book to absolutely everyone. If you have an interest in complicated family dynamics, wedding planning, or emotional romances, then this is the book for you! And please, if you’ve read this book after seeing my review, or have already read it PLEASE come chat with me! I loved this book and I need someone to gush about it with.
Thank you so much to the publisher for providing me with an ARC!
RELATED POSTS: Today Tonight Tomorrow Book Review
To celebrate the official release of this amazing book I decided to try something I’ve only done a handful of times in my life… I baked a cake. I thought the perfect way to celebrate would be baking and decorating a cake to match one of the layers from the cover! While this creation wasn’t perfect, I thought it was super cute and tasted delicious. Here was the final results:
Have you read We Can’t Keep Meeting Like This? Is it on your tbr? Would you eat some of that cake if I offered it? Let me know and let’s chat!
Stephanie
Okay, first of all: how CUTE is that cake?! Ummm I love it! And also, this is such a great review. I added this book to my TBR the moment I first read about it (which was when I was writing up my list of new releases at the beginning of the month). I definitely need to check it out soon!
Alexis Gauthier
Thank you, Stephanie!! That means so much to me and brought the biggest smile to my face. You’ll definitely have to let me know when you pick this up so that we can chat about it!
Ely @ Earl Grey Books
Congrats on the new blog, Alexis! This is such a cute post honestly—I don’t think I’ve even gone as far as to make a cake for a book or anything like that, clearly I need to step up my game!
Alexis Gauthier
Awww, thank you!! I can’t tell you how much that means. Lately I’ve been struggling to truly enjoy content creation, so I decided I wanted to try something that I hadn’t really done before…aka the cake! It was a lot of fun and It made me really love creating the content for it!