Maybe Someday by Colleen Hoover
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“I never realized how powerful desire could be. It consumes every part of you, enhancing your senses by a million. When you’re in the moment… all you can do is focus on the person in front of you.”
Once again, Colleen Hoover has delivered an emotionally charged masterpiece that will capture your heart! Maybe Someday is not your typical romance but I promise you, it is one of the most deeply passionate and uniquely beautiful books I have ever read.
Pure perfection!
5++ stars!!
Maybe Someday was utterly unique and refreshingly original. I honestly do not have a single other book to compare it to, nor have I ever read a plot line even similar to this one. Everything from the way the characters met to the twists and reveals all took me by surprise and kept me guessing the whole way through.
Colleen Hoover’s writing has this beautifully gripping, compelling quality to it that draws you right into the lives of her characters. From the first few lines, I was fully immersed in this story and stayed connected until the very last word.
Ridge was the kind of guy who everyone will fall in love with – a gorgeous, sweet, talented musician with a heart of gold and who was also hiding a big secret. Everything about him made me either swoon or melt.
Sydney was one of those heroines who I just immediately liked. She was kind, endearing and earned my respect more than once with the way she handled the situations she was put in.
I truly loved everything about this book and about their romance – the texting, the flirting, the slow but powerful build of their connection… the music, the song writing, the heart ache and also the pranks. The strong emotional undercurrent that ran throughout the entire book was so intense that you could just feel it in every single scene.
There were moments that made my laugh so hard that I had to stop reading until I could recover and moments that broke my heart so completely that I just sat there with tears streaming down my face.
The way Ridge and Sydney connected through their music was hypnotic, beautiful and downright hot. They each had something that the other needed and pretty soon, the lines between making music and falling in love began to blur.
There was also an incredibly awesome feature worked into the book where real, listenable songs that had been written and recorded specifically for this book were integrated throughout the story in such a way where you would be prompted to listen to them at the exact right time. And holy wow were they just out-of-this-world incredible!!! For me, the most special part of all was being able to listen to the song after watching them create it from scratch together. It was truly just a magical experience.
The story is also told in alternating POVs so the reader really gets to see all the different sides of the story and is really able to connect to each character individually.
But… if you want a little idea of what to expect from the story, then read on. I don’t reveal any major twists and I don’t tell you how the story ends, but because of the complexity of the situation, I felt the need to talk a little about how it made me feel.
Here goes…
I’m just going to lay it right out: there’s a love triangle. But this is not your average love triangle. Just like the rest of the book, this one is completely different and unique and despite the fact that as a reader I’m not usually fond of triangles, I absolutely adored the way this one was written.
We actually found out very early on in the story that Ridge had a girlfriend, Maggie, and it was abundantly clear that she wasn’t just a random girl he was semi-attached to. No, this was a girl who he was completely and totally, til-the-day-I-die in love with. She was kind, sweet, loving and honestly just a beautiful character both inside and out. But when Ridge and Sydney met, they too had an undeniable, soul-deep connection. Now, before you ask, this is also not a cheating book either. Ridge loved Maggie and would never want to hurt her, and Sydney had just come out of a relationship where she was betrayed by her boyfriend so in no way would she ever want to put another girl in the situation she was in. But, despite their best intentions, that connection between her and Ridge grew stronger and stronger even though they both fought it with everything they had.
“Having her so close feels as though we’ve created our own personal space and nothing from outside our world can make its way in, and nothing from inside our world can make its way out.”
Emotionally, my heart was all over the place. I genuinely did not know what to feel. I was so conflicted because there was no right or wrong here. No good guy or bad guy. I knew that this was Ridge and Sydney’s story so my heart was rooting for them but I couldn’t help but wonder… what if this had been Ridge and Maggie’s story? Because in that case, Sydney would have been the “bad guy” for representing a threat to their relationship. I mean, as much as I hated to admit it, didn’t Maggie deserve to be with Ridge just as much as Sydney? And it didn’t help that both Sydney and Maggie were such wonderfully sweet people and neither of them had any flaws that made it easy to justify disliking them for any reason.
“Hey, Heart. Are you listening? You and I are officially at war.”
This is not a book where you can hate anyone. You can’t be annoyed with anyone, you can’t fault anyone, and there is no one to blame. There’s nothing that makes you feel better about or justifies what you’re feeling. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt and I couldn’t pick a side. It just hurt. But I had no idea who I was hurting for. The best answer would be everyone.
“Nothing in my life has ever felt so good, yet hurt so achingly bad.”
There were no ‘teams’. No black, white, or even grey zones. There were just people. And feelings. Strong, powerful, all-consuming feelings. And choices. Impossibly painful, heart-wrenching choices and still… no. right. answer. But honestly, the fact that this book was able to mess with my emotions so strongly was one of the things I loved most about it.
“God, I hate feelings. Or I hate my conscience. The two are constantly at war and I’m not sure which one I’d rather turn off.”
The thing is, you can’t help who you fall in love with. No matter what the brain insists on, at the end of the day, the heart calls the shots and no matter how much we try and fight it, or deny it, it’s the one thing that can’t be covered up.
I loved that the author had the guts to write a story where there was no “bad guy” because it meant that there was no easy way to justify your feeling and with the way it was written, I truly felt each character’s conflict as though it were my own. Especially Ridge. I swear I spent half the book just wishing I could hug him.
This was one of those rare books where I never once, not even for a single moment, was angry or annoyed with anyone. Not to say that I wasn’t conflicted about their actions because holy hell was I ever torn and utterly unsure of everything I was feeling but at the same time, every single thing that happened was understandable. I was rooting for everyone’s happiness and I loved that I was never (not even in the end) made to hate anyone.
The ending was really just brilliantly laid out and incredibly well paced leaving me with the most wonderful feeling knowing that every single part of the story had been wrapped up.
This book kept me up reading til 4:30AM. I couldn’t put it down, couldn’t glance away from the page, and as desperate as I was to find out what was going to happen, I just didn’t want it to end.
It was fresh, unique, and unpredictable. I felt fully connected to each of the characters and I honestly don’t have a single complaint to make. This book is perfect. Truly perfect
I can’t recommend it highly enough. Read this book. Live it. Love it. Allow it to take over your heart. It’s an unforgettable journey that every reader should take.
Rating: 5++ stars! Standalone romance.
Also, on a side note, I really strongly visualized every single thing in my head as I was reading. Every scene, every character, every location is crystal clear in my mind so I’m going to pray to the movie gods that this story ends up on the big screen because it would make one helluva movie!
“I never realized how powerful desire could be. It consumes every part of you, enhancing your senses by a million. When you’re in the moment… all you can do is focus on the person in front of you.”
All in all, this was a light romantic read, with some really good characters.
their rooms. Every smell is the same, the smell of the love your mum cook in the kitchen, the smell of you father always disappointed in you, the smell of betrayal that just won’t go away, the smell of the new success you just got, the smell of regrets. Everything is same but yet different because what has changed is YOU.
Be the home you deserve, be the human you know you are. Just don’t fall apart because its easy to fall apart more than making the pieces you already have, stronger. Stick with your family, let them see you, the real you, let you happiness shown in your faces its when you will make a change in your own home. No one has changed they still love you. The love of family is Natural, we have got it from the start and will get it to the end.
Derek Palacio was born in Evanston, IL, in 1982 but grew up in Greenland, NH. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. Palacio’s work has appeared in Puerto del Sol and The Kenyon Review, and his story “Sugarcane,” was selected for inclusion in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013. He is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, a non-profit creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. Currently, Palacio lives and teaches in Lewisburg, PA, where he has completed work on a novel about a small Cuban family struggling to remain whole after fleeing the island as part of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift. He is currently working on a collection of short stories relating to Cuba’s past, present and future.
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