Never Always Sometimes by Adi Alsaid | Book Review

Never Always Sometimes by Adi Alsaid

Publication Date: August 4th 2015
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Genre(s): Contemporary Romance, Young-Adult
Series Status: N/A—Stand Alone
Page Count: 320
Source & Format: Bought, Hardcover

Synopsis from Goodreads:

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.

Hello bookworms, and happy Thanksgiving for all of you Canadians out there! ❤ I hope you all enjoyed your day. 🙂 On this fine Monday, I have for you a review on the book Never Always Sometimes by Adi Alsaid! Now, I’m kind of sorry to be posting this right now, because, as you can probably infer from my rating, I wasn’t the biggest fan of this book, and really, it kind of goes against the whole warm, happy feeling of this day…I really wanted to love this book, and I really thought I would, but overall it was not the best of reading experiences.

Plot

“No point in living a life less ordinary if you don’t know what the other side looks like.”

I wish so much that I could’ve enjoyed the plot more. It has so much potential to become a story I’d love! It’s the fact that it could’ve been so much better is what gets on my nerves. The idea of the Nevers list sounded fun and creative, and the whole implied best friend romance thing is one of the things that drew me to the book in the first place. But somewhere in the execution of the plot, everything just went all wrong for me. It was quite hard to even get through the first part of the story, and as the story went on, I just wasn’t okay with the direction it was taking. I suppose this is more of a personal situation; of course this may not apply to all readers. To be honest, what really frustrated me in the end was how misleading the synopsis was—and how much the characters ruined the plot for me. A few of them simply lacked some much-needed consistency and they made the story feel all over the place. I know that doesn’t explain that much, so let’s continue on to the…

Characters

As you probably have guessed by now, I wasn’t a big fan of the characters. Although I liked the banter between Julia and Dave, the two main characters, after a while it wore off when the characters got on my nerves.

I’d say Dave was one of my biggest problems with the book. Remember when I mentioned above that I had a hard time getting through the first part of this book? Yeah, well it was written in Dave’s perspective—and I didn’t particularly enjoy it.

“If the lights ever went out in her presence, Dave was pretty sure the brightness of her eyes would be more useful than a flashlight.”

Umm, yeah, no thanks. These things tend to fly over my head sometimes, but this is a tad too cheesy, and under the many circumstances throughout the book, I’m not falling for it.

Of course, I didn’t immediately dislike him or anything. He seemed pretty nice, but that didn’t last for long. Dave was just too much of an inconsistent character, and was a pretty spineless character.

(—POSSIBLE SPOILER AHEAD—Not exactly sure if it’s a spoiler since it’s not in the synopsis, but it’s a pretty big part of the plot that you discover soon enough) I also wasn’t a big fan of the love triangle. It came out of nowhere, and although I commend the author for writing a less traditional love triangle, I simply didn’t care about Dave or it (the love triangle). I know I’m starting to kind of repeat things here, but really, that’s the main point—I just didn’t care about or like Dave. Harsh, but it’s true.

Moving on to Julia, the other main character whose perspective we also get. In a nutshell, she’s eccentric, wild and utterly ridiculous. I was a cross in between indifferent to her and annoyed with her for the first part of the book, though I guess after we get into her POV, I started to warm up to her more. I was enjoying her character quite a bit, but then there were several things that got me miffed about her. Very cryptic, I know, but I don’t want to give away any spoilers. 😉 Bottom line is, my feelings varied several times throughout the book; lots of negatives, I have to say, but overall she was an okay character.

Writing Style

I wasn’t completely sold on the writing style, at first. Just putting that out there. Not saying it was bad or that I didn’t like it, just that it felt really pretentious (kind of going with the plot and characters, I suppose) and I was unsure about it. However, there’s no denying that it was great writing! There were definitely some beautiful passages in there, and it was quite easy to fly through. There was a really nice simplicity to the writing that ended up really working for the story.

“We like to think that we’re formulas that even out exactly, that we are perfect matches with each other. But we’re not. We match up with lost of people, more or less.”

Overall…

I didn’t enjoy this book. I wasn’t a big fan of the characters, since they basically ruined the plot for me with their personalities and the choices they made. That being said, I definitely think if they were improved, and I cared about them more, I would’ve loved this book. This book had a very John Green feel to it, and although I wouldn’t exactly recommend it in a blink of an eye, I know other readers may enjoy it more than I did. There was definitely a slight unique touch to this book, but there were also plenty of cliches—so it’s your call! Just remember that this is not your average best friend romance… don’t go into it expecting an amazing cute romance! If that’s the case, I recommend heading for Rainbow Rowell instead.

I’ve seen other mixed opinions on this book, some positive, and some negative, and I just wanted to say, if you’ve read this book and loved it, great! This book seemed like it was pretty hyped for a while—I hope no one rages on me for not liking it, haha. 😀 So, my opinion on this book is; if you think it’s for you, go for it! The last thing I want it someone missing a potential favourite because of my review. And as I said, a lot of people loved this book, maybe I was too harsh?

Either way, let me know your thoughts on this book below, whether you’ve read it or not. I’d love to hear from you!