See You Yesterday by Rachel Lynn Solomon
Genre: YA Realistic Fiction
Blurb (on back of book):
Barrett Bloom is hoping college will be a fresh start after a messy high school experience. But when school begins on September 21st, everything goes wrong. She’s humiliated by the know-it-all in her physics class, she botches her interview for the college paper, and at a party that night, she accidentally sets a frat on fire. She panics and flees, and when she realizes her roommate locked her out of their dorm, she falls asleep in the common room.
The next morning, Barrett’s perplexed to find herself back in her dorm room bed, no longer smelling of ashes and crushed dreams. It’s September 21st. Again. And after a confrontation with Miles, the guy from Physics 101, she learns she’s not alone—he’s been trapped for months.
When her attempts to fix her timeline fail, she agrees to work with Miles to find a way out. Soon they’re exploring the mysterious underbelly of the university and going on wild, romantic adventures. As they start falling for each other, they face the universe’s biggest unanswered question yet: what happens to their relationship if they finally make it to tomorrow?
MY OPINION: ***
This book was honestly a let-down for me because of how much I loved Rachel Lynn Solomon's other novel,
Today, Tonight, Tomorrow. However, I also knew that I'm not a big fan of this trope so I didn't necessarily have the highest of expectations for it.
The book uses the Groundhog-Day trope in which the character gets stuck in the same repeating day over and over again. I just recently read another book exactly like this and I also just feel like this is a very overused trope. It's so specific that we only really need a couple of things with it but this one felt unnecessary. I did think there was potential though: the main character finds herself trapped with one other person, a boy in her physics class. A romance twist on the trope had all the potential for me to raise my standards.
However, I ultimately wasn't a fan of this one. I didn't really like either of the characters and nothing had me kicking and squealing like her other book did. I also have to say that the days were definitely varied and diverse, and wasn't as boring and repetitive as I'm accustomed to with this trope. I found it refreshing to read about a different version of the same basic day. Each day also seems to promote some sort of character development in Barrett and Miles, so there's that.
Barrett was honestly kind of annoying to me. She constantly whined about her life and blamed everyone else besides herself for her own weaknesses. Miles was cute, I guess, but he was also really annoying. He was too reactionary and got mad about the stupidest things. I did like the brother storyline but that was about it.
I think this is where my YA era is going to end for now because this was too cliche and cringe at times for me. YA romances are so funny to me because they treat sex like a taboo topic but this one actually dealt with the topic fairly nicely in a sex-positive way, which I enjoyed. There was also a lot of representation in this book of a variety of different identities that I respected because a lot of times, books in YA use a lot of tokenism of one or two identities and move on.
I will say this was VERY real to life when it comes to freshman year of college.
Overall, I have to say I didn't really enjoy this one as much as I had hoped but I also would not put this author down and never read her books again. I think this one is more about the tropes and my personal dislike of them, so I'd still recommend it to readers who like these tropes!
Main Character: Barrett, Miles
Sidekick(s): Friends, family, etc
Villain(s): Time loop, etc
Magical Realism Elements: This book is mostly realistic save for one "magical" part.
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