This is another story set in the world we are living in now. It has so many actual examples of this pandemic reality we are still a part of. And in the end, it kind of took its fictional status to kind of predict the future or near future. All I can say is that I hope things don’t go on quite that long. Another year of online learning will really make me a bit scared for my job as a school librarian. But that’s beside the point.

A little different than my last book that I read set in today’s events, this one actually has the COVID-19 directly affecting our main characters. One of them had, Eli, has asthma, and so the whole time I was worried about him getting it as soon as I found out. But not only do we deal with sickness, we have to worry about people taking advantage of others in this in the outside world as well. There is danger from all directions. The love story itself is easy enough, even while Eli makes Cami hold out and he woos her as seems appropriate for the story. Their background is a perfect place to begin the story as well.

Now at first I was afraid I wouldn’t like Cami, as she actually seemed to fit right into the wealthy girl, Paris Hilton type of stereotype. But when we got her side, and saw how her life had been, and why she was that way, it made a bit more sense. And made her someone more easy to like and root for. Another thing I really liked about this story though, was all the kind of pop culture of the time it brought in. Like the TikTok thing where girls were surprising their boyfriends by walking in naked on them while they were playing video games. That got a bit in this story.

If you’ve had personal connections to people who are sick right now, or who were, this might be a hard read for you. But the romance is good, the story is good, and it fits. The reason I marked down to 4.5 was because the ending seemed to kind of drag on. I like though that we do know the next book will probably be Cami’s brother and her best friend also having a similar type of trapped together forcing them to face their feelings. But if we get her brother’s time spent as a doctor in NYC during all of this, that will probably be really intense and even harder to read than this one.

Review first appeared on Lisa Loves Literature.