Every morning, Neil McNair awakens Rowan Roth with a text. A taunting text: they’re the two top students in the senior class, and sworn rivals. But on the last day of school, there are only two competitions left: who will make valedictorian, and who will win Howl, a citywide senior class event, “part Assassin, part scavenger hunt.” Rowan thinks about Neil so much that her friends believe her obsessed, a notion that Rowan finds ridiculous. Until, that is, the long night of Howl, when the two meet each other’s families, talk about the last four years, and even share a dance. In Rowan and Neil, Solomon (Our Year of Maybe) has created two complex, believable characters—word lover Neil has his future planned out, but his present is way more complicated than Rowan knows. She’s an aspiring writer, but she’s afraid to tell anyone—for one thing, her parents are children’s book authors; for another, she wants to write romance, a genre that she sees as feminist in its focus on female desire but that is frequently dismissed as “trash.” Enemies turned lovers is an old romance trope, but in Solomon’s deft hands, this funny, tender, and romantic book is fresh and wholly satisfying.
