Thank you to Wednesday Books (via NetGalley) for the ARC!

This was SO cute and has firmly cemented Dahlia Adler as one of my favorite YA authors 🥰

It's pitched as a queer <i>Sliding Doors</i> rom-com and it delivers on all fronts. Natalya, our main character, has to decide what to do the summer before her senior year of college: spend it, as usual, in NYC with her friends and her dad and (maybe, finally) talk to the cute red-haired girl she keeps seeing around the city; or do the scary new thing and take a 2-month long internship at her mom's company in LA, when she hasn't spent more than a few days with her mom since she left for the west coast a few years ago.

I knew I was going to love this book when we got two Chapter 3's: that's when the storyline splits and we get the beginnings of Nat's adventures in LA and Tally's adventures in NYC (good thing Natalya has, like, 4 nicknames so it's easy to differentiate her chapter titles!).

One of my favorite things is that, no matter which storyline we follow, Natalya ends up learning some of the same things: 

1. She discovers that she wants to do graphic design in both timelines. It's through slightly different means, but she comes to the same conclusion that she'd be able to use something she loves (art) in a career. 
2. She's able to rekindle a relationship with her mom. That was one thing she wasn't optimistic about at the beginning of the book. She'd never had much in common with her mother, and the distance made things harder. But both when she's with her mom in person and through phone conversations while Natalya stayed in New York, she and her mom are able to reestablish a relationship that worked best for them. 
3. She learns how to cook a Shabbos dinner! Natalya mentions MANY times that she needs to ask her neighbor Adira to teach her how to cook a Shabbos dinner since her mom doesn't observer the Sabbath, and her dad doesn't cook, so they rely on Adira's cooking or takeout. In both timelines, Natalya learns how. In NYC from Adira, like she always wanted to, and in LA from Adam, whose amazing cooking skills allow him to be a quick study once Natalya tells him which dishes are traditionally eaten during a Shabbos meal.

I think my highest praise for this book is that I was equally invested in both the romances (although maybe, possibly, slightly leaning towards Elly a teeny bit 😋). Adam and Elly get equal screentime, and I absolutely LOVED how the ending came together because I had no idea how it was going to happen.

I was really on the edge of my seat during the last chapter and I would have been 100% fine not knowing who was on the other side of the door, but the "choose your own adventure" vibes of the follow-up chapters were so cute and I of course read both of them 🥰

Also: not really a spoiler but I very much enjoyed Jasmine and Lara's cameos in the NYC timeline 😌

Anyway, if you're a fan of contemporary YA romance and you haven't read any of Dahlia Adler's books yet, what are you doing?!?!?