Never date your best friend.
Always be original.
Sometimes rules are meant to be broken.
Best friends Dave and Julia were determined to never be cliché high school kids—the ones who sit at the same lunch table every day, dissecting the drama from homeroom and plotting their campaigns for prom king and queen. They even wrote their own Never List of everything they vowed they’d never, ever do in high school.
Some of the rules have been easy to follow, like #5, never dye your hair a color of the rainbow, or #7, never hook up with a teacher. But Dave has a secret: he’s broken rule #8, never pine silently after someone for the entirety of high school. It’s either that or break rule #10, never date your best friend. Dave has loved Julia for as long as he can remember.
Julia is beautiful, wild and impetuous. So when she suggests they do every Never on the list, Dave is happy to play along. He even dyes his hair an unfortunate shade of green. It starts as a joke, but then a funny thing happens: Dave and Julia discover that by skipping the clichés, they’ve actually been missing out on high school. And maybe even on love.
I had heard enough positive things about Let’s Get Lost that I just had to request this one – after all, the premise sounded quite cute and fluffy. Unfortunately, though, it wasn’t for me.
Julia and Dave, our main characters, seemed like something out of a John Green novel – they were quirky and overly intelligent, and Julia seemed like a manic pixie dream girl. That’s not to say that they weren’t realistic, though – when I was in high school, there were many individuals that tried very hard to avoid being a high school cliche. I didn’t particularly like either Julia or Dave – the former was manipulative and a pretty awful friend, and the latter spent way too much time lamenting over the fact that he was in love with his best friend – but their banter was rather entertaining.
I was expecting a friends-to-lovers relationship, which I suppose is what I got – the way that it came about, though, did not sit well with me. That being said, although it was an ending that I didn’t particularly enjoy, it was one that I didn’t expect…
Overall, Never Always Sometimes had all the makings of an “Erin story,” but unfortunately did not live up to my expectations.
I received a copy of this book from Harlequin Teen and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
