Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 677
This week I've started listening to the audiobook for Here's to Us by Becky Albertali and Adam Silvera - this being the sequel to What If It's Us. I had actually pre-ordered this with my last Audible credit over the holidays and the book became available for listening right before the end of the year.
I had read the first book after I had received a copy as part of a company exchange gift sort of arrangement. I had heard good things about the book but I didn't feel like I was the sort of person to buy a cheese YA LGBT romance novel like this, so I figured I'd get other people to gift it to me instead. And I didn't even read it immediately - I let it sit for a while together with another book of the same genre, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens.
But when I did get around to reading it, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The alternating POV structure was a really good idea that balanced out the contributions of the two authors without feeling as disjoint as things like Will Grayson, Will Grayson. And sure, it's super cheesy "kilig content" as I like to think of it, but it was very well-done writing of this nature. And the ending wasn't too unrealistic without taking away some of the magic.
Then I sort of double-down and eventually got the audiobook edition of the book on sale and absolutely loved how Noah Galvin and Froy Gutierrez brought the protagonists to life. Their reading of the text somehow elevated my love for all this, so much so that I promised myself that I'd wait for the audiobook edition of the sequel novel instead of getting a copy of the book (or ebook).
And so here we are.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through the book already and I'm really appreciating what they've done. They didn't quite give the boys a fairytale ending at the end of the first novel and things started at an interesting place in this one. And what continues to get me is how a lot of the story is hard to predict until we get to the points that are predictable but they're not bad plot points? And I don't get this with most of the (limited) books of this genre that I end up reading, so this just gets me.
And that's it, really. Just gushing over a cheesy book that makes me smile and is ridiculously hard to put down stop listening to. It's definitely good quarantine fare given how bleak things can feel at times. And there's no harm in experiencing stories that make you feel good. And maybe I've just grown soft and sappy in my older years (or at least my Tobie years).
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