3.5 stars

I really wanted to like this book more, but I had a hard time with it. I'll start with the positives: The anxiety rep in this book is really good. Paige is 18 and has dealt with anxiety most of her life, but doesn't know it. She has coping mechanisms, but still thinks she's a weirdo and that her brain is broken. She's literally paralyzed by making decisions and jumps to the worst possible conclusion whenever she can. This book does a good job of explaining how anxiety feels without being able to put a name to it. I think this comes from the author's own experience with anxiety, so it gave it a very realistic feel.

I did also like the two timelines where we were able to see what happened in both situations. I think that was cleverly done, and it was interesting to see how Paige handled both situations: she made dumb mistakes in both, but she also learned things about herself in both timelines.

However, my biggest disappointment was with Paige's characterization. To me, she doesn't have a personality outside of being in love with her best friend of 5 years. Every decision she makes (or doesn't make) has something to do with him. She thinks about him ALL THE TIME, even when there is nothing going on related to him. I understand that this is an all-consuming thing and she's totally in love with him, and that feelings like this are huge when you're a teenager, but I feel like all of that came at the expense of her character. I actually almost stopped reading the book about 80 pages in because it was so annoying. It was literally all she ever talked or thought about!!! She is very one-dimensional and doesn't have any definable personality traits outside liking this guy (and having anxiety? But that's not a personality trait). It was just disappointing to me that every single thing in her life came down to this guy, and I was less interested in her getting a happily ever after than I thought I would have been. Because at that point it just seemed boring.