We Are Inevitable by Gayle Forman

When I picked up WE ARE INEVITABLE, I thought it was going to be a tongue-in-cheek apocalyptic romance because of the comets raining down from the sky. But I was mistaken, and confused by the blurb: the comets are actually a metaphor for how, when things go wrong, they tend to all go wrong at once.

Aaron is a nineteen-year-old slacker fossilizing in the metaphorical tar pit of his shitty life: he hasn't gone on to college or gotten a good job and his older brother died of a drug addiction several years ago, which caused his mom to jump ship from the family. Now he lives with his dad, in a failing, rotting bookstore that is quite literally falling apart. His father is emotionally shutting down and living his life in a brain fog, which means that Aaron is shouldering all of the financial and emotional labor. When one of the other business owners in town makes him a deal for the store, it only seems rational to sell.

There's a big community focus on this book and the manic pixie dreamgirl love interest makes this feel like it could be one of those Michael Cera indie moves from 2011. I liked how the town sort of rallied around Aaron and his dad; it's sort of the Horatio Alger vision of small town Americana, where sense of community overcomes any and all differences. I also liked how this was a love story to story-telling at its core, and it had some genuinely moving and beautiful passages about what it means to be human.

This book was difficult to read in the sense that most of the people in it were not very easy to like, and I'm not sure that was always intentional. Aaron was relatable and a good example of how grief can cause people to shield themselves with anger, but it was still very hard to watch him treat people the way that he did. And Chad was an interesting character, in that he used to be a bully before having an accident that required him to use a wheelchair, which then caused him to rethink his priorities in life and the effect he was having on the world, but I did ask myself a couple times if it felt like his accident was used to "punish" him and set him on a redemption arc. I'm always a little leery of stories where it feels like the bad things that happened to people can be allegories for quasi-religious redemption arcs. Particularly when characters who are portrayed as wholesome in the text, like Ira, kind of wallow in their own obliviousness.

The romance itself was okay. The twist with Hannah was unexpected, and I think it kind of saved her from being too manic pixie and explained why she behaved the way she did, and I always appreciate any attempts an author makes to subvert a tired trope. I didn't actually think that Aaron and Hannah had much chemistry; he was so damaged and cut off that it didn't feel like he was ready for a relationship, even by the end. But the author sort of made it work. I'm not mad at the story. But WE ARE INEVITABLE did end up like a lot of bits and pieces that had been cobbled together into a big experimental piece that didn't quite work.