I was granted eARC access to Where It All Lands by Jennie Wexler via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to whoever approved me! My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.
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About the Book
Where It All Lands
by Jennie Wexler
Published 6 July 2021
Wednesday Books
Genre: YA Romance
Page Count: 352
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!
Stevie Rosenstein has never made a true friend. Never fallen in love. Moved from city to city by her father’s unrelenting job, it’s too hard to care for someone. Trust in anything. The pain of leaving always hurts too much. But she’ll soon learn to trust, to love.
Twice.
Drew and Shane have been best friends through everything. The painful death of Shane’s dad. The bitter separation of Drew’s parents. Through sleepaway camps and family heartache, basketball games and immeasurable loss, they’ve always been there for each other.
When Stevie meets Drew and Shane, life should go on as normal.
But a simple coin toss alters the course of their year in profound and unexpected ways.
Told in dual timelines, debut author Jennie Wexler delivers a heartbreaking and hopeful novel about missed opportunities, second chances, and all the paths that lead us to where we are.
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My Review
My Rating: 4 Stars
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Where It All Lands is an interesting take on the age-old teenage love triangle story. When Stevie moves into town, best friends Drew and Shane are both interested. They decide to solve the conundrum of who asks her out the way they solve all their problems: they flip a coin. This book takes us through both timelines, heads and tails, and how both paths lead to the same heartbreaking events.
Team Shane, all the way! This book is adorable, heartbreaking, and definitely not anything I’ve ever read before. This is the first time I’ve seen a book billed as dual timeline cover the same timeframe. This is a multiverse exploration, a Schrodinger’s box experiment with the hearts of three teenagers.
I must admit, I’m not a huge fan of how the timeline was split. We follow Drew winning the coin toss all the way up to “the horrible event,” then rewind and reset for Shane and follow that timeline all the way up to the same event, then flip flop every chapter until each timeline comes to some form of a conclusion. I think I would rather have had the timeline flipping start sooner in the book so I could have an idea of what to expect from the dual timeline deal before we got too far into Shane’s half. When we flipped back to Shane winning the coin toss, I honestly thought my eARC copy was faulty and had repeat chapters in the middle, then I realized it was Shane’s POV but thought maybe I read something wrong at the beginning and Drew had gone for Stevie despite losing the coin toss. I didn’t realize it was the other future from the coin toss until Stevie’s budding friendship with Ray went differently because of the lack of Drew dates.
Overall this is an interesting book with a lot of complicated moments that really tug at the heartstrings. I prefer the ending to Shane’s timeline, but I appreciate the honest reality of the ending to Drew’s, and the silver linings that come out of both. Read this book if you like YA coming-of-age stories, sweet romances, or stories that explore completely the “what ifs” of all possible outcomes of a single event.
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Great review. Adding this to my tbr.
I haven’t heard of this book, but it sounds so interesting with the dual timelines. It does sound like it would’ve been better though if the flipping between timelines happened sooner in the book