Disclaimer: I received this e-arc from the publisher. Thanks! All opinions are my own.

Book: You Can Go Your Own Way

Author: Eric Smith

Book Series: Standalone

Rating: 1/5

Recommended For...: young adult books, contemporary, romance

Publication Date: November 2, 2021

Genre: YA Contemporary Romance

Recommended Age: 14+ (Language, Vandalism, Sexual content, Dead parent, Grief, Sexism, Bullying, Underage consumption of alcohol)

Explanation of CWs: There are a few curse words said in this book. There is a vandalism scene in the beginning of the book. There are some sexual content and jokes told. Adam has a deceased father and it’s brought up a lot in the book, as well as his and Whitney’s grief. There is some sexism discussed. There is some underaged drinking. There is also a lot of bullying scenes.

Publisher: Inkyard Press

Pages: 336

Synopsis: Adam Stillwater is in over his head. At least, that’s what his best friend would say. And his mom. And the guy who runs the hardware store down the street. But this pinball arcade is the only piece of his dad that Adam has left, and he’s determined to protect it from Philadelphia’s newest tech mogul, who wants to turn it into another one of his cold, lifeless gaming cafés.

Whitney Mitchell doesn’t know how she got here. Her parents split up. She lost all her friends. Her boyfriend dumped her. And now she’s spending her senior year running social media for her dad’s chain of super successful gaming cafés—which mostly consists of trading insults with that decrepit old pinball arcade across town.

But when a huge snowstorm hits, Adam and Whitney suddenly find themselves trapped inside the arcade. Cut off from their families, their worlds, and their responsibilities, the tension between them seems to melt away, leaving something else in its place. But what happens when the storm stops?

Review: This was an ok book. The book had good character development for the most part and I liked the world building. I also liked the main plot of the story and I thought it was a good plot.

But, oh my, this book probably made me question myself as a reader. I’ve heard a lot of good about this book and I went in with high expectations and this book faltered on everything I thought. The beginning of the book is a complete mess and nothing was explained for awhile. The parents in this book do not talk like parents. They two main characters are horrible and I felt nothing for either of them. There’s not a descriptor for any character in this book, which left me confused as to how to paint these characters in my mind. There is a lot of elitist and sexism video game talk, Adam is a bit of a purist in his pinball talk and Whitney, who is an avid gamer supposedly even though she hardly does it throughout the book and is more micromanger, talks down about people who play games like Animal Crossing rather than Mass Effect. The Twitter conversations that the kids have between each other are NOT how kids or companies talk to each other on Twitter. The whole of the book focuses on one thing, but at the end you figure out it was all for nothing and it’s “fixed” with possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. The ending of the book fixed nothing and a lot of plot holes are just left out. The whole of the book just made me extremely angry and I feel like I wasted a lot of time reading it, and while I understand that this is an arc and it was unfinished by the time I got it I do not feel any inclination to pick up a physical copy of this one.

Verdict: Not for me, but you can try it out.