What If It’s Us is the worst gay story I’ve ever read

I thought Simon was good. You know, she made Simon! At least she made Simon!! Maybe this book could be good!

Ah, poor innocent ol' me…

This must've been one of the greatest fall-offs I've ever seen in an author. I have no idea what happened to make this book so bad, but it's embarrassing through and through, especially compared to Simon and other similar books.

This book feels resistant to any form of progress. The two characters don't grow, don't change, don't struggle, and don't live. They're just static pieces of cardboard who have nothing interesting going on. They occasionally reference politicians like they're celebrities and cite random parts of Millenial culture as a substitute for an actual personality. The constant references to Ivy League colleges are off-putting and don't contribute to the story at all. They just exist in a bland, wholesome paradise with the only conflict coming from their mistakes and stupidity.

In the beginning, I genuinely had a hard time trying to decipher their ages. They acted like young adults in some scenes, and teens in other scenes. These characters are canonically born in 2002, but they act so much like millennial adults that I have to wonder what the author was thinking.

The dual POV was executed terribly in this book. Every chapter, it alternates between Ben and Arthur and it isn't handled well. There's not really a main character or main storyline, so the book feels disorganized and unfocused. Each character has their own group of family and friends, which causes everyone to be spread way too thin. Most of the side characters have basically no impact on the plot or story at all.

After a lesson in the dangers of cyber stalking (or not!) we finally have their meet-cute, and we finally reveal their white-bread personalities. For Arthur, liking Hamilton is a more plot-relevant personality trait than him being Jewish. The pop culture references are what an MCU hater thinks the MCU is like. Most of it the next 200 pages are bland dating and wacky hijinks, including the insanely stupid "accidental groomer" and "why are you white" scenes. I don't want to elaborate on what those are.

Ben is insanely stupid for A: Taking his date to the same place his ex went (You have the entirety of NYC at your fingertips, and you go to Dave and Buster's???) and B: Continually lying and covering up about his ex. This goofy blunder somehow builds up into an extremely short third-act breakup… which is then quickly ended by a hospitalization, which turns out to be a false alarm. It ends with the worst euphemism sex I've ever read, and the two of them leaving each other because screw romantic progression!

I'm serious: by the end of the book, the characters literally have not changed at all! Everyone stays the exact same! The ending especially burns me out because it's the most obvious sequel hook imaginable… I'm not reading it. I don't want people to read any of these books, because I certainly don’t want any of this terrible slop to become popular.