Book Review: Maybe Someday by Colleen Hoover.

Product details:
Publisher: Simon & Schuster.
Paperback, 384  pages.
Release date: March 18th 2014.
Rating:  3½ out of 5.
Ages: 17+ || New Adult
Source: Received from publisher for review.

Sydney is living in an idyllic bubble - she's a dedicated student with a steady job on the side. She lives with her best friend, has a great boyfriend, and the music coming from the balcony opposite hers is fast becoming the soundtrack to her life. But when Sydney finds out her boyfriend is cheating on her, the bubble bursts. The mysterious and attractive man behind the music, Ridge, gives Sydney hope that she can move on and they begin to write songs together. But moving on is harder than she expects, Sydney can only hope…. Maybe someday… Colleen Hoover draws you in to this passionate tale of music, love and betrayal…

Twenty-two year old Sydney has just discovered that her boyfriend of two years, Hunter, has betrayed her in the worst possible way.  He’s been cheating on her, and not with just anyone, but with her best friend and roommate, Tori.  Sydney throws a few punches, packs her bags and moves out of her apartment. Then she finds she has nowhere to go. Enter Ridge. The hot guitar-playing guy from the apartment across the way, Ridge takes Sydney under his wing. He even takes her out for cake, because, while this is Sydney’s day from hell, it also just happens to be her birthday. Also, Ridge was the one to break the news to her about Hunter’s cheating ways, so he feels bad. Hmmm…Or maybe Ridge just wants to have his cake and eat it too. While the attraction between these two is undeniable, there’s something Ridge isn’t telling Sydney, something he ‘forgets’ to mention, and it’s that he has a girlfriend: a girlfriend of five years, a girlfriend who loves him very much, and who he loves just as much.

Why, then, when Ridge knows that he’s attracted to Sydney does he invite her to live with him? Why, when he has a girlfriend, when he’s in a happy, long-distance-yet-committed relationship, does he invite Sydney to stay? That’s not okay. Ridge may have the best of intentions in life, and he may not intend on taking things any further than friendship with Sydney, but he also knows right from day one that he’s attracted to her. Then, as a guy in a relationship, he has the responsibility of respect towards his girlfriend. In no way should he go there with Sydney. Seriously. This guy needs to man up and grow a pair.

As for Sydney, well, for a girl whose boyfriend recently cheated on her, you might think she’d want to spare another girl the same kind of hurt, but no. Even after Sydney meets Ridge’s girlfriend Maggie, even after the two bond and form a fast friendship, she doesn’t curtail her feelings for Ridge. She also doesn’t move out of his apartment, which, really, would have been the decent thing to do. Instead Ridge and Sydney embark on an emotional affair, an emotional affair where they share their innermost thoughts and feelings with each other, an emotional affair that sees them hang out night after night in Ridge’s room where they co-write lyrics for his band, where they fall asleep on his bed, and where they fall in love. Ridge and Sydney also pride themselves and are super pleased with the fact that there are totally honest with each other. It’s a shame that neither of them is honest enough to tell Ridge’s girlfriend what’s going on.

  

While I’ve heard a whole lot of good things about Colleen Hoover’s books, Maybe Someday is the first one I’ve read. Cheating is a tricky subject to tackle, and while Hoover is sensitive to the fact in that she makes Ridge and Sydney’s an emotional rather than a physical affair, I have to say that I was never on board with these characters. I never rooted for them. I never wanted them to be together. I didn’t in any way agree with their actions. I just thought the whole thing was wrong. Cheating’s a big no-no for me. It’s a total deal-breaker. No matter how much you dress it up; no matter how sexy or sweet or sensitive you write a guy, it’s just not going to work for me. I was on Maggie’s side. I can totally understand how Ridge and Sydney found themselves in their predicament, but for two characters who continually pat themselves on the back for their honesty, they were pretty shady in a lot of ways, even with themselves, even with each other: especially with Maggie. I gotta say, it all just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Leaving Ridge and Sydney aside, I struggled with this book at first because it not only takes a while to get going, but it is also pretty slow-paced and a little repetitive throughout. Also, for a work of New Adult fiction, Maybe Someday walks very much on the tame side of things. I don’t know about you, but I like my ‘NA’ hot and steamy, and I guess this just didn’t do it for me. I liked Hoover’s writing, though, and I liked her secondary characters. Well, there’s no contest there, really. I liked the secondary characters in this book more than I liked the primary characters. The lyrics included in the text didn’t really leave much of an impression on me, because, honestly, while I love music, I find that lyrics in books just never really seem to work. Here, Ridge and Sydney use confess their feelings for one another through their lyrics, so, yeah…

Overall, Maybe Someday was a worthwhile read, but it’s also a romance, and as you can see, it didn’t exactly leave me swooning.  There is a lot more I could say about Ridge and in particular the complexities of his relationship with Maggie, but then, we’d be here all day.  I will say, though, that by the end of the book my thoughts on Ridge were pretty much the same as they were right at the start: I still think that guy needs to man up and grow a pair.