I read this after watching and hating the Amazon series based on this book. Happy to report the book is far better than the show. I dunno who the show runner was or why they made the changes they did to the show, but it really screwed up an overall good contemporary romance story.

If you also watched the show and hated it I'd recommend giving the book a chance! In the show I really hated Sam's character. Percy was also pretty meh, but now that I've read the book I think a lot of it was a bad script and strange production choices that really did not align with the original story. The show also barely jumped into their childhood, Percy's relationship with Sam's mom, her swimming, her panic attacks, etc... So everything felt very disjointed. The show also added or gave more of a role to side characters, but not necessarily for the better.

Anyway, this was a quick and well-written contemporary romance. It is a good example of second-chance romance, friends to lovers to strangers... It explores deeper themes than we sometimes get in contemporary romance spaces -- who we once were vs who we are now, the significance of found family both throughout childhood and throughout our lives, regret, and more.

Solid summer beach read, but with a bit more depth than your typical rom com contemporary romance.

Interesting concept, and definitely not what I was expecting going in. I enjoyed this more than That Summer Feeling by the same author, which I think is largely due to the dual POV and more developed characters.

That said, I still felt like something was missing. The premise is genuinely unique, and I liked the idea of exploring multiple versions of ourselves and getting lost in the possibilities of multiverse theory. But the story takes place over a relatively short period of time, which has been a sticking point for me with both of Morrissey's books I've read. The characters have known each other since high school and have years of history as rivals, but much of that history is conveyed through exposition and internal reflection rather than something we really get to experience alongside them. As a result, I never felt quite as invested in their relationship as I wanted to be.

The other issue for me was how often the story told me what its themes and lessons were rather than trusting me to arrive at those conclusions myself. I'm generally more forgiving of tell-not-show in contemporary romance because some degree of it is often intentional and works perfectly well for the genre. Here, though, the characters' emotional realizations and the book's larger themes were explained so explicitly that I sometimes felt like I was being given the takeaway rather than getting to discover it for myself.

Still, this was a quick read with some more serious themes and an unusual premise. If you're looking for something that follows a fairly familiar romance structure but puts it against a slightly different backdrop I could see this working well.

For me, though, it ultimately landed somewhere in the middle. I liked the concept more than I connected with the execution, so overall I'm feeling pretty meh about it.