We Can't Keep Meeting Like This by Rachel Lynn Solomon

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Quinn Berkowitz and Tarek Mansour’s families have been in business together for years: Quinn’s parents are wedding planners, and Tarek’s own a catering company. At the end of last summer, Quinn confessed her crush on him in the form of a rambling email—and then he left for college without a response. Quinn has been dreading seeing him again almost as much as she dreads another summer playing the harp for her parents’ weddings. When he shows up at the first wedding of the summer, looking cuter than ever after a year apart, they clash immediately. Tarek’s always loved the grand gestures in weddings—the flashier, the better—while Quinn can’t see them as anything but fake. Even as they can’t seem to have one civil conversation, Quinn’s thrown together with Tarek wedding after wedding, from performing a daring cake rescue to filling in for a missing bridesmaid and groomsman. Quinn can’t deny her feelings for him are still there, especially after she learns the truth about his silence, opens up about her own fears, and begins learning the art of harp-making from an enigmatic teacher. Maybe love isn’t the enemy after all—and maybe allowing herself to fall is the most honest thing Quinn’s ever done.

• I always find writing a book review difficult when I absolutely love a book. With We Can't Keep Meeting Like This, all I want to do is flail and scream, “You need to read this fantastic book!” but here I have to put my love for the book in actual coherent words, when all I want to say is that I loved every single thing. I will try my best to say a bit more than that.

• Rachel Lynn Solomon’s book, Today Tonight Tomorrow, was one of my favorite books of 2020 so I went into this hoping for another new favorite. And it did not disappoint.
• Solomon’s writing is absolutely superb. She is able to capture the reader from the very first page. Also, I adore that Solomon is able to write authentic characters that make you feel like you, the reader, are a part of the story. Quinn, the protagonist, is someone you can easily become friends with and it seriously makes the book highly readable and fantastic.
• Quinn is such a relatable character. She has always worked with her family in their wedding planning business but with college looming, she's not quite sure how to break it to her family that wedding planning may not be something she wants to do in the future. However, she isn’t even quite sure what she would like to do instead. This uncertainty and her worries are extremely relatable.

• There are so many facets of Quinn’s life that readers get to read about. While the romance was sweet and heartwarming, I found Quinn’s journey of understanding herself and what she wanted to be much more moving. Solomon created a fantastic story with a lot of different moving parts, all woven together seamlessly. 
• There is anxiety and OCD representation in this. While I cannot speak to the OCD representation, the anxiety representation was very well done. 
• We Can't Keep Meeting Like This has a romance at its core. Plus, there's actual communication between the two characters and it's glorious. One thing I dislike about a lot of romances—YA romances, especially—is that there is a focus on a whole lot of kissing and thinking about kissing and not a whole lot of talking to each other and working out their feelings. This romance has a great balance of both, making it refreshing and lovely. 

With phenomenal writing, laugh out loud moments, and all the feels, We Can't Keep Meeting Like This by Rachel Lynn Solomon is a superb summer read that you'll want to return to again and again.