Yes No Maybe So by
Becky Albertalli
My rating:
2 of 5 stars
I went into this book with high expectations, after all its Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed, two excellent authors who have written earlier books and this is their first ever collab. In this we follow two povs, Jaime Goldenberg, a Jewish boy who lives in the suburbs with this sister, mom, and grandmother. His mom works for a state councilmen, and his cousin is helping the Democrat candidate run for the special election. Then we introduce Maya, a Muslim girl whose parents have recently separated and it was a bombshell. This book was pitched to me as a romance between two inter-religious people, with 50/50 politics and love. Let’s just say I was immediately hooked.
My issues are many with this book. To start off, let’s address the representation. While I can’t directly speak to this as I am not Muslim, I did notice that Maya was the only Muslim character in the whole book (other than her parents). I just kind of found that odd because she did attend a mosque during Eid and we see that on page, however there is no mention of any Muslim friends or acquaintances she would inevitably have.
Another thing that ticked me off was the fact that Jaime, our blissfully ignorant white male, had bought and gave food to Maya four (4) times during Ramadan when he knew she was fasting. Maya had to keep on reminding him that she can’t consume that, and then she ended up being the one who apologized to HIM for “getting mad” that he kept on trying to give her food? Like that whole thing was really off, I understand that it happened this first time with the Goldfish and became an inside joke with them two, however I see no reason why then the authors went and made him look like a clown four more times.
That leads me to the romance, it was the most cliche and in my opinion, unrealistic thing. So we know that they are childhood friends that went to an after school camp together, their moms were best friends years ago, and they haven’t seen each other in about ten years. In fact, during their first chance encounter at Target, they didn’t even recognize each other. However, that storyline fell flat because the authors never developed that aspect of the story. This could have been so well done and used the childhood friends-to lover trope but instead it was the insta-love trope. For gods sake, they both said “I’m in love with you” before they even had their first kiss. Their whole “friendship” spans less than two months, and they were already making “i love you” declarations before they ever went on their first date (in fact we don’t see them go on a first real date in this book at all.) The plot was just super predictable in that aspect, boy meets girls, childhood best friends reconnect about ten years, they spend their whole summer together, and then they’re head over heels. They had no hardships to overcome weirdly, only a brief stint with Maya’s parents being hesitant about this relationship, to which they then relented almost immediately. Maya and Jaime both lied to eachother i’m pretty significant ways, but when they found out each others secrets they just brushed it off and never even had a real conversation about how hurt they were. Cut to them making out in the Target dressing rooms. Yeah.
Oh and not only that, but there was this whole storyline of Maya realizing the distance and loss with her best friend, her *only* friend Sara, who was a year older than her and moving to college. It was supposed to be their late summer together, but Maya barely days Sara because she worked over forty hours a week to be able to afford college. Cue to Maya whining for the whole summer about how abandoned she feels, etc. The whole was a yawn because we didn’t see any of their childhood backstory since the “Elmo” days. To me, they didn’t even seem that close to begin with because we didn’t get any flashbacks or backstory. So for the whole book, Maya has no female friend, her only “best” friend is Jaime. That just seems unrealistic to me.
A great reprieve and the only part of the book that I was really interested in was the politics, this was a special election, their candidate was a progressive in a very red zone. The 50% of the book about the politics surrounding them, was the best part in my opinion. Otherwise, I genuinely disliked all the characters with the exception of Maya, who made the book bearable enough to keep on trudging. If your looking to pick this book up, I would say save your time and instead read a similar yet stellar title like Love from A to Z by S.K. Ali.
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