Review: Maybe This Time by Kasie West

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Maybe This Time was a sweet young adult romance that doesn’t deal with anything heavy or alarming. It’s refreshing and quite adorable.

The book centers on Sophia Evans. She has big plans for leaving her small Alabama town and becoming a fashion designer in New York. Unfortunately, she has to make do with what she has and ends up working for the local florist. Enter Andrew Hart. His father is a famous chef who has embarked on a new career of helping small-town businesses make it big. His father begins to work with Sophia's best friend’s father’s catering business and plans to make is successful in a year. This means that Andrew is going to be a constant attendee to all the major events in town like Sophia. It wouldn’t be too big of a problem for Sophia if he wasn’t so arrogant.

Maybe This Time is structured interestingly, which I think works to its advantage. The book takes place in over a year; however, it is sort of told in flashes of life. What I mean is that everything happens at nine events (including a wedding, funeral, fundraiser, etc…). Everything outside of the major events is mentioned but never shown. 

I found this to be an interesting concept. And it worked very well. As mentioned previously, Sophia worked for a florist and it was her job to be at these events. And since Andrew's dad was mentoring Micah's (Sophia’s best friend) and he was catering, it made sense for him to attend those events too. Even those Andrew and Sophia only met at a handful of different events and never when she wasn’t working, there was still so much between them. There was banter and playfulness about their relationship. And the growth was intriguing to watch. Sophia disliked him for the beginning but as time went by and they kept running into each other, something new developed between them. 

I do have a small complaint about the book. I felt that it ended sooner than it should have. The main characters get together at the very end of the book and unfortunately, us readers don’t get to experience them in an actual relationship. They both are so young and I can’t help but wonder how they are going to make the relationship work especially since they won’t be in the same town. Or anywhere remotely near each other for a while. I wish the author would have done a “One Year Later” jump just to wrap up loose ends and provide clarity to where these characters end up. And that final chapter could still keep in theme by being centered on an event like a wedding, funeral etc..

Final Analysis 

Maybe This Time was a cute story who two characters who don’t quite get along in the beginning but grow to like each other after constantly running into each other.