**I sip on my lemonade as I sit on my picnic blanket outside, re-reading an old favorite. I smell the grass and listen to the birds flying overhead, as I immerse myself in this story once again, leaving me with a nostalgic feeling of returning home. It strikes me then that I must do a review on this one. I will set up my typewriter immediately.**

I am not someone who re-reads books. Ever. I never feel as connected to the story or characters and never feel the same way about the book the second time. I also don’t re-read because I fear that I won’t like it again when going back into the story. The Unexpected Everything by Morgan Matson is one of the only books that I have ever re-read. I fully annotated one of my copies during this read (which is my fourth time reading it), and I had a lot of thoughts on it, more on how it made me feel.
I read this book twice the year it came out, again in 2022, and once again in May. Just to put it out there, this is not a book you should read for plot. This book is a YA contemporary, just over 500 pages, and honestly not a lot happens. But I still love it. This is a summer story about a girl named Andie who has her entire summer planned out, but when her father is in the middle of a political scandal, her summer plans fall through, and for the first time in her life, Andie doesn’t have a plan.

There is something about this book that feels so real to me, as if it could be a real teen girl spending a summer with her friends, finding a boyfriend, and getting close to her father who hasn’t been around much. A lot of contemporaries feel unrealistic to me. I can’t fully put my finger on it, but I suppose it’s because they always have some interesting element to it that makes it seem less realistic. This book is simply a teen girl’s summer, but I like it because nothing crazy happens. It is a very realistic summer that someone could have. 

One of the book’s strongest aspects is the relationships shown throughout the story. Starting with the friend group, we see Andie interact with her three friends, and I love the relationships between them. I always felt like in books the friends are around for the beginning, disappear as soon as the love interest appears, then make a return at the end of the story. This is not a book that does that. Even when Andie meets someone, we see that she is still hanging out with her friends. They also have traditions and inside jokes that make them seem more realistic, like Palmer’s challenges, the scavenger hunt, and how they meet up at the diner.

Moving on to probably my favorite relationship, Andie and her dad. Andie’s dad is a politician and their relationship is a bit strained since he hasn’t been around much. As the reader, we can really see the strained relationship between the two, how neither knows what to say and they both awkwardly stand around. We watch this grow and we see as the two of them talk and spend more time together and develop a stronger relationship. I have never cared about a parent/child relationship as much as this one. It helps that I also love Andie’s dad as a character.

Then finally we have Andie and her love interest. This is not my favorite romance, but I do appreciate the way it is done in the book. Andie starts off completely uninterested then circumstances push them together and they really get to bond. Oddly enough, I usually prefer a romance in a fantasy book compared to a romance or contemporary, so it’s not out of the ordinary for me to not fully love a romance in a YA contemporary. 

The next thing I want to bring up is the tone shift. If you feel as though this is a spoiler, feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph. This time reading, I felt like there was a shift in the tone of the story towards the end, maybe the last third or quarter. The beginning is a mostly feel-good summer story with a mostly care-free feeling to it, but I personally believe that there is a shift later on. It feels like the transition from summer into fall, or maybe like time has passed and we see characters age. I think it has something to do with the closure that Andie feels in the book when she puts something that she held onto behind her. We also see as her feelings for the love interest deepen as we see brief moments with Andie and her friends, but we only see these brief scenes for a moment, seeing as she is thinking about Clark and not fully present. I love the way this is done and I feel like we can really see her as she falls for Clark more. 

I would love to talk about the end, but that goes into spoiler territory, so I will just say that I feel like that was another part of the book I enjoyed. I hate it, and it hurts to read it every single time, but I think that it was a realistic part of someone’s life, so as much as I don’t like the outcome at times, I appreciate the end for its realism. 

There are so many moments in this book that make me feel something. There are some lines in here that I find funny and it makes me laugh thinking of them. This story always makes me smile thinking of it and I love the relationships and how everyone interacts, which is the absolute highlight of the story. Even though there are funny and heartwarming moments, there are also a few scenes that really tug at your heartstrings. This is one of those stories that I will probably always come back to and will always think about and love. For my rating, I gave this book a 4/5 stars. Even though this isn’t a five stars, it is still one of my all-time favorite books. I feel like it’s hard to accurately rate a book upon a re-read, because I’ll never feel the same as I did when first reading it, but I still love it and highly recommend it to everyone.

Rating:

xoxo,

Just another reader