Book Review:: If I Were You | Cesca Major

The good ol’ fashioned body swap, but make it your sister’s wedding weekend, and the groom is one of the boyfriend’s oldest friends so everyone at the wedding is someone you know!

Amy and Flynn have issues. They’ve been drifting apart recently. Amy is pulling away, and Flynn is doing anything he can think of to pull her back in. They’re close to a breaking point when Amy’s sister Laura and Flynn’s friend Jay are getting married. Everything is on hold until afterwards. But on the way there, the tension is palpable and eventually boils over when a herd of cows makes it impossible for them to make it on time. Pacing around the car in the pouring rain, lightning strikes, and they’re thrust into the wrong bodies.

Flynn is someone who will do anything to smooth things over for other people, including bending himself into whatever shape they need him to be & lying about just about everything. Amy is an assertive bleeding-heart (activist) who doesn’t usually bother to hear the whole story before taking up arms and refuses to chase her own dreams. I didn’t like either one of them, which made it hard to enjoy this story.

Man, I really hate to say that, because I LOVED Maybe Next Time by this same author & was so looking forward to this book. The concept is intriguing – magical realism is sometimes a little hard to swallow, and unfortunately that’s exactly the case for this one.

Largely this book hung upon a whole lot of miscommunication. It’s aggravating as a reader, but can be realistic. In this case, it didn’t even feel all that realistic. These two characters have been in a relationship for two years but know almost nothing about each other. I think for this to work, we would have needed to see more of what was holding them together. I concede it’s not really a romance, more of a personal growth story (for both MCs), but it just didn’t track for me, logically. We get to see the weekend they met/got together, but that wasn’t enough to carry the weight of all the baggage throttled atop them.

The wedding antics were typical rom com faire: silly, everything-goes-wrong-that-can-go-wrong sort of stuff. It annoyed me that neither one of them was remotely good at impersonating the other, which only reinforced the idea that they know nothing about each other.

I wasn’t a fan of the beginning either. The chapters were quite manic as the body swap was happening, and I think half of them were completely unnecessary, personally. I’ve seen readers complain about dual timelines a few times and have never understood that complaint. However, I’m not sure it was necessary in this book. It’s already complicated enough with the body swap aspect. I think having the characters reflecting on their pasts and their worries about what might come out during the wedding festivities could have made them more likeable and sympathetic. As it is, they’re only worried about it like they’re still terrified of their life partner finding out anything deeper about them…I just couldn’t connect to that.

The author did take the opportunity to explore a topic that is only possible with a book like this: the physical space a body takes up and the dynamic it automatically creates – being physically bigger or smaller than someone else is a power dynamic, even if most of us don’t leverage it that way. It was only a minor exploration though, because everything in this book seemed to only scrape the surface.

I am grateful for the publisher & netgalley for providing me with an advanced readers copy of this title. It was an intriguing idea…I just wish I liked it more.

Details

Title:: If I Were You
Author:: Cesca Major
Genre:: Women’s Fiction/Magical Realism
Publisher:: William Morrow
Length:: 384 pages
Audio Length:: 9h 20m
Audiobook Narrator:: Katherine Press & Nikolas Salmon
Audiobook Publisher:: Harper Audio
Published:: September 24th, 2024
The Litertarian Rating:: 3-Stars