Blurb:
Today she hates him.
It’s the last day of senior year, Rowan Roth and Neil McNair have been bitter rivals for all of high school, clashing over test scores, student council election, and even gym class pull-up contests. While Rowan, who secretly wants to write romance novels, is anxious about the future, she’d love to beat her infuriating academic nemesis one last time.
Tonight she puts up with him.
When Neil is named valedictorian, Rowan has only one more chance at victory: Howl, a senior class game that takes them all over Seattle, a farewell tour of the city she loves. But after learning that a group of seniors is out to get them, she and Neil reluctantly decide to team up until they’re the last players left – and then they’ll destroy each other.
As Rowan spends more time with Neil, she realises he’s much more than the awkward linguistics nerd she’s sparred with for the past four years. And, perhaps this boy she claims to despise might actually be the boy of her dreams.
Tomorrow… maybe she’s already fallen for him.
Rating: 5/5 stars
Side Notes:
- Genres: Young Adult Fiction, Contemporary Romance
- Highly recommend for 14 years and above
- TW: antisemitism, misogyny, domestic abuse (mentioned), car accident (mentioned), bullying, explicit language
- Romance Tropes: Enemies to Lovers
Book Quotes:
- “There’s this word in Japanese: tsundoku,” Neil says suddenly. “It’s my favorite word in any language.” “What does it mean?” He grins. “It means acquiring more books than you could ever realistically read.”
- “Maybe it’s the whole concept of a guilty pleasure,” Neil says gently. “Why should we feel guilty about something that brings us – pleasure?”
- “While I love romance, I’ve never believed in the concept of soul mates, which has always seemed a little like men’s rights activism: not a real thing. Love isn’t immediate or automatic; it takes effort and time and patience. The truth of it was that I’d probably never have the kind of luck with love the women who live in fictional seaside towns do. But sometimes I get this strange feeling, an ache not for something I miss, but for something I’ve never known.”
- “My favourite books got happily-ever-afters— why couldn’t I?”
- “The love that I wanted so desperately: this isn’t what I thought it would feel like. It’s made me dizzy and it’s grounded me. It’s made me laugh when nothing is funny. It shimmers and it sparks, but it can be comfortable, too, a sleepy smile and a soft touch and a quiet, steady breath. Of course this boy—my rival, my alarm clock, my unexpected ally—is at the centre of it. And somehow, it’s even better than I imagined.”
- “Boy bands, fan fiction, soap operas, reality TV, most shows and movies with female main characters . . . We’re still so rarely front and center, even rarer when you consider race and sexuality, and then when we do get something that’s just for us, we’re made to feel bad for liking it. We can’t win.”
- “When he grins, it’s bright enough to light up the night sky. It’s kind of beautiful.”
- “Maybe that’s the definition of nostalgia: getting sappy about things that are supposed to be insignificant.”
- “How do you tell the person you’ve spent four years trying to destroy that you have a crush on them?”
- “Crush’ is too weak a word to describe how I feel. It doesn’t do you justice, but maybe it works for me. I am the one who is crushed. I’m crushed that we have only ever regarded each other as enemies. I’m crushed when the day ends and I haven’t said anything to you that isn’t cloaked in five layers of sarcasm.”
- “Neil McNair has become my alarm clock, if alarm clocks had freckles and knew all your insecurities.”
- “Today isn’t my epilogue with Neil—it’s a beginning. I’ll leave the happily-ever-afters in the books.”
- “I want to embrace what i love all the time, not just with Neil on the last day of school, when the stakes are pretty much nonexistent. I want to be fearless about it even when people judge it. ‘I guess it’s like in my head, my writing can be as great as I want it to be. But as soon as I declare I’m a writer, I’ll have something to prove. It’s hard to admit that you think you’re good at something creative. And then it’s so much worse for women. We’re told to shrug off compliments, to scoff when sometime tells us we’re good at something. We shrink ourselves, convince ourselves what we’re creating doesn’t actually matter.”
- “I’ve given this boy the messiest parts of me, and he’s done nothing but convince me he’ll be careful with them.”
- “You like it,” he says. There’s a glint in his eyes, like he understands something I don’t. “You like that nickname.” And . . . I kind of do. It hasn’t felt irritating in a while. It’s only his, a language only we have, even if it’s a reference I don’t understand.”
- “Four years of sparring when we could have had this: his awful singing voice, his hip bumping mine to encourage me to sing along, the scarlet on his cheeks when I attacked him with icing. While I was so focused on destroying him, I missed so much.”
- “I, um, I read what you wrote in my yearbook. In my defense, it was tomorrow, and I thought you hated me. But I’m in love with you, Neil McNair -Neil Perlman- and I think maybe I’ve been in love with you for a long time. It just took my brain a while to catch up to my heart. I don’t know how I missed it, but you are pretty fucking great.”
- “I’m in love with you. You are the most interesting person I know, and I’ve never been able to talk to anyone the way I can talk to you. I’ve devoted the past four years to leaving Seattle, but you…You are the best thing about this city. You are going to be the hardest to leave. I love you so much.”
- “Maybe this version of you would have been cool. But…you’re kind of great now, too”
- “Yeah. Like every moment you’re with them, your head is spinning and you cant catch your breath and you just know that this person is changing your life for the better. Someone who challenges you to be better.”
- “Its real. Neil loves me.”
- “All the books in the world couldn’t prepare me for this moment.”
- “But sometimes I get this strange feeling, an ache not for something I miss, but for something I’ve never known” -Rowan”
- “I tug his hoodie closer. We’re not soaking wet anymore, just a little damp. Now that we’re outside again, I’m convinced the smell of his hoodie had to be the rain. I’m not still thinking about it, but if I were, its just…petrichor.”
- “Maybe this is how I’m supposed to say goodbye to high school: not with an arbitrary list or a preconceived notion of the way things are supposed to be, but by realizing we’re actually better together.”
- “He’s waiting on a bricked street with a rickety staircase that leads to the museum. His hair mussed, his posture slightly hunched. Why did I ever tease him about those freckles? I love them. I love every single one of them. I love his freckles and and his red hair and the too-short legs of his suit pants and the too-long sleeves, the way he laughs, the way he pushes up his glasses to rub his eyes.”
- “Love isn’t immediate or automatic; it takes effort and time and patience.” -Rowan”
- “People think it’s harmless. They think it’s funny. That’s why they do it,” I say, trying to ignore the strange shiver where he touched my arm. Must be static electricity. “And sure. I guess it’s harmless until something bad happens. It’s harmless, and then there are security guards at your synagogue because someone called in a bomb threat. It’s harmless, and you’re terrified to get out of bed Saturday morning and go to services.”
- “Is there a word for what happens after your sworn nemesis lets you into their room and tells you their secrets?”
- “But you like it. It’s possibly the boldest thing he’s said all day, and when he takes a step forward, I can feel the heat radiating off him. No wonder he was fine parting with his hoodie—the boy is a human sauna. You like being infuriated. By me.”
- “Opposites attract is my favorite trope, so it made sense to start there. Because, of course, the thing about opposites: they always have a lot more in common than they think”
- “People change, Rowan. Thank God they do.”
- “You and I have to always be the best, right? So we’ll be the best at long distance, if thats what we decide to do.”
- “The love that I wanted so desperately: this isn’t what I thought it would feel like. Its made me dizzy and grounded me. Its made me laugh when nothing is funny. It shimmers and its sparks, but it can be uncomfortable, too, a sleepy smile and a soft touch and a quiet, steady breath. Of course this boy -my rival, my alarm clock, my unexpected ally- is at the center of it. And somehow, its even better than I imagined.”
- “You’re never too anything for books. We like what we like” -Rowan”
- “I love words, and that’s what I want to do. There’s no better satisfaction than using precisely the right word in a conversation. I love the challenge of learning a new language, and I love discovering patterns. And I find it fascinating that words in other languages have crept into our vocabulary. ‘Cul-de-sac,’ ‘aficionado,’ tattoo…”
- “Neil is softer than I realized, and I’m a barbed-wire fence. Every time he gets too close, I make myself sharper.”
- “You realize how wrong and outdated that is, right? Good girls aren’t supposed to have sex, but if they don’t, they’re prudes, and if they do, they’re sluts. And of course, none of that takes the spectrum of gender or sexuality into account. Things are starting to change slowly, but the fact is, it’s still completely different for guys.”
- “But sometimes I get this strange feeling, an ache not for something i miss, but for something I’ve never known.”
- “Then I take a deep breath…and I let it all go.”
- “It’s not until I lean back in the seat, waiting for my car to warm up, that the scent of his hoodie hits me. Its smells good, and I wonder if its detergent or just the natural scent of Neil, one I’ve never really paid attention to before. I guess I’ve never really been close enough to notice. I’m stunned by how much I don’t hate it, so much so that it makes me light-headed for a split second.”
- “It doesn’t feel like teasing when you go out of your way to make me feel like garbage for liking what I like. I already have to defend it enough with my parents, and with my friends. Like, I get it, ha ha, sometimes there are shirtless men on the covers. But what I’ll never understand is why people are so quick to trash this one thing that’s always been for women first. They won’t let us have this one thing that makes us happy. Nope, if you like romance novels, you have zero taste or you’re a lonely spinster.”
- “Neil being this good a dancer-its kind of hot. Neil. Hot.”
- “…and then I’m spiraling again. In the light, his freckles are almost glowing, his hair is a golden amber. Everything about him is softer nearly to the point of appearing blurry, like I cant tell who this new version of Neil McNair is, leaving me more uncertain than ever.”
- “It, uh. It doesn’t look bad, ya know. You’ve been playing with it all day, but. It always looks nice.’ This. This is the hair that always looks nice.”
- “That swipe deserves its own romance novel.”
- “I just want to make sure-I don’t know. That you realized its me.”
- “Now I’m even more certain why I couldn’t picture him kissing anyone else: because it was always supposed to be like this. With us.”
- “All these years, we were fighting when we could have been…not fighting.”
- “From all the books I’ve read, I thought I understood the concept of love, but wow, I knew nothing.”
- “I want- I want to be a writer. And not in the sense that I’m writing and that, by definition, makes me a writer – it’s what I want to do with my life. And it feels…really lonely sometimes. Not the actual writing – of course that’s mostly solitary. But feeling like I can’t tell anyone, it almost makes me think it doesn’t really exist” -Rowan”