how did we get here...

Reading each chapter is like a warm hug—I’ve never felt so truly understood as a young adult moving far away from home and eventually losing touch with childhood friends, living with both hurt and hope. Your twenties is just surviving life as best as you can while trying to find who you are, growing from your teenage mistakes, and making amends when people can prove they are worth it again … and that’s what this standalone truly is about.

Beside its bittersweet odes to queer and non-binary identity wrapped up in hometown melancholia (including important class representation), It Goes Like This also rekindled my fever for writing and performing music with its clever, semi-fictional portrayal of the industry and sneaky Taylor Swift references (!). (Part of why I’m sad right now is absolutely because Moonlight Overthrow is not a real band, and I can’t just become a Cosmic Queer that reblogs their dazzling gifs, concert videos, and interviews.) With subtle, lyrical choice of words in its prose (check out the quotes on Goodreads!), the book gently reminded me of my love for meteorological and astronomical imagery—and my love for language, literature and storytelling.

And as a lovely, added bonus, I've never come across an author that understands Tumblr culture (especially in the 2020s today, with most of us caught between that and Twitter/Instagram culture) so well.

The only (tiny) flaw it might have is that there are few explicitly tonal differences in chapters narrated by different characters, but other than that, each of the (several!) timelines and transitions were handled excellently.

I want to close out this soft gushing session with a quote from (our QUEEN) Victoria Schwab’s beautiful article about coming out, which kept echoing in my head the entire time I spent reading It Goes Like This:

Teenage girls are always loving their friends, becoming entangled, like trees grown together, so you think that’s what it is. You call it friendship when you lean your head on her shoulder between classes. You call it friendship when she draws tiny notes in the plaid margins of your uniform skirt. You call it friendship when she throws her arms around your shoulders and everything in you settles like silt.

‘Til the moon crashes into the sea ~