Book Review: We Are Inevitable by Gayle Forman

We Are Inevitable by Gayle Forman

Published by: June 1st 2021 by Simon & Schuster Children’s
Rating: ★★★★★
Genre: Young Adult // Contemporary, Romance

**This book was gifted to me by the Publisher for an impartial review. There was no obligation to post/give this book a certain rating. This gifting in no way alters my review.*

Trigger Warning: this review talks about addiction – if you are affected by these topics, please see SAMHSA (USA) and MIND (UK)

I got this whole-body feeling… it was like a message from future me to present me, telling me that in some way we weren’t just bound to happen, that we had, in some sense, already happened. It felt… inevitable.

So far, the inevitable hasn’t worked out so well for Aaron Stein.

While his friends have gone to college and moved on with their lives, Aaron’s been left behind in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, running a failing bookshop with his dad, Ira. What he needs is a lucky break, the good kind of inevitable.

And then he meets Hannah. Incredible Hannah – magical, musical, brave and clever. Could she be the answer? And could they – their relationship, their meeting – possibly be the inevitable Aaron’s been waiting for?

If you know me (and my past reviews) you’ll know I’m a huge Gayle Forman fan. Her novel I Was Here is one of my favourite books of all time. I always have such high expectations going into one of her books because I know just how much they exceed them perfectly.

Aaron, our main character, has lost his way. He’s not totally aware of it at the start, but he’s incredibly close-minded and pushes people away without really getting to know their true intentions. He runs a bookstore with his dad, Ira. Lately, it’s just the two of them. There used to be his brother, Sandy, and mum. But after Sandy died due to addiction, and his mum went traveling, it’s been the same old routine of feeling utterly stuck in a small town where nothing changes, and he doesn’t either.

But after taking up an offer from one of Sandy’s old friends, Chad, to go to see a band play, Aaron meets Hannah. She’s this magnetic force that completely bewitches him. His parents always talked about the feeling of knowing they were inevitable when they met, and when Aaron meets Hannah, he feels it too. She’s all about music, fearlessly herself and makes him open up to the possibilities that he could be missing out on a lot of life by remaining stagnant. Only, Aaron has done something horrible from under Ira and the bookstore, and living with that on his conscious as local people offer to build up their store to make it disabled-friendly, building bookcases and even getting a coffee machine, makes him feel awful. He latches onto the wrong parts of his life opening up, heading for a steep downfall that I saw coming entirely, completely rooting for him to come out of it unscathed.

Overall, We Are Inevitable was a complete curveball of a book. I definitely thought I was heading into more of a romance than contemporary, but what I got was so much better and impactful. Not only was I utterly in awe of the character development that blended flawlessly with the pace, but of the inclusivity and discussions of sexuality and addictions, additions of chronic illnesses and nonbinary characters. Gayle has written something so breathtakingly captivating that I wish I could reread it over and over. It definitely had that Looking For Alaska vibe (my favourite book ever) and that made me love it even more. I feel like it was totally inevitable that this book and I would be a match made in heaven. Five stars completely.

About The Author

Award-winning author and journalist Gayle Forman has written several bestselling novels for young adults, including the Just One Series, I Was Here, Where She Went and the #1 New York Times bestseller If I Stay, which has been translated into more than 40 languages and in 2014 was adapted into a major motion picture. Gayle published Leave Me, her first novel starring adults in 2016 and her latest novel, I Have Lost My Way, comes out in March of 2018. Gayle lives with her husband and daughters in Brooklyn.

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happy reading!