WHAT IF IT'S US by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera

Rating: An unsuccessful attempt at hiding a yawn

Highlight of note: Positive if dull LQBTQ representation proving gay people can be boring too.

Will you read more by these authors? Honestly, if I'd recognized Albertalli's name before putting this on hold, I probably wouldn't have read this one because she's underwhelmed me so solidly in the past. So, for her: probably not. At least if I manage to remember who she is. As to her co-author, I don't know. Maybe his other stuff has more personality? So maybe?


I wish I'd loved this book, but I completely failed to connect to it. I felt the same way about Albertalli's previous work, Simon Vs the Homo Sapians Agenda, so I'm pretty sure at this point that that her writing just doesn't inspire passion for me.

In this book, we have two boys, Arthur and Ben. They check off some nice diversity boxes on paper; Ben is Puerto Riccan and Arthur a Jewish kid with ADHD. And they're both gay. So, yay? The problem is, except for the bit about being into dudes, these details of their identity appear to have been jotted down and then ignored. Arthur's religion appears to be irrelevant to his family and his ADHD is treated to the point that there are zero signs of it anywhere. (I can only wish that's how things worked in the real world, but as someone with ADHD that responds to medication, I can assure you it doesn't. Albertali is a psychologist; she should know better.) Ben seems a little more tied to his heritage, but it still doesn't seem to affect his family much outside of the occasional Puerto Riccan food for dinner. (Then again, Silvera is Puerto Riccan, so maybe that's what it comes down to in real life.) Ben is also apparently "bad" at school but good at writing, which seemed a bit Mary Sue to me.

The big issue to me, though, was that despite being written by two different people, the boys' voices sounded exactly alike. The chapters are told in alternating narrative with the narrator's name helpfully provided at the start, and I found quickly that if I put down the book in the middle of a section, it was hard to figure out who was narrating when I picked it up again. At one point, this happened while they were on a date. For a solid two pages, they spoke to each other while only pronouns were used and I had no idea who was saying what.

Also, although their meeting was cute, I never felt any real chemistry between the boys. Apparently they enjoyed making out with each other, but there didn't seem to be any more to it than that and I was honestly not sure how they managed to progress to the point of making out when they showed so little interest in each other.

Right after Arthur managed to read the entirety of the cheesy fantasy novel Ben was working on for years in the time it takes to listen to Hamilton (either Ben writes really slowly or Arthur is a speed reader), I checked my progress. I was only half way through and I'd been slogging away at this thing for two full afternoons already. I couldn't tell if the relationship was going well or not and really didn't care. I figured I either had two hundred plus pages of watching bland people date or something was going to happen to disrupt things, probably something melodramatic and silly. Then they'd make up but Arthur had to go back to Georgia and that would be the end of that. So I bailed. Looking up spoilers for how it ended, I feel I made a good call. My only mistake was for hanging in there as long as I did.

At this point, I'd usually add a copy of the notes I took in reading, but this didn't actually inspire any. No, not even during their meet-cute. The writing wasn't bad, so I couldn't make comments about that. And the writing wasn't good, so there was nothing to praise. It was just dull and uninspiring.