See You Yesterday by Rachel Lynn Solomon Book Review

Hello everyone, it’s Zainab, welcome or welcome back! So, this book review is for the first book I read in 2023. I have already done a book review this year for As Good As Dead, but I read that right at the end of 2022 – so this is technically the first! I went into See You Yesterday not really knowing much except the synopsis, I had never read a book by the author, and I hadn’t seen any promotion for it.

This book was actually kindly sent to me by publishers Simon&Schuster however I was under no obligation to read or review it. So, all my thoughts in this review are honest and genuine. Let’s jump into it!

OFFICIAL REVIEWS

See You Yesterday was published in May 2022, so it’s still fairly recent, and still kept up some good reviews! On Goodreads, it has an average star rating of 4/5 and an average of 4.4/5 on Amazon and Barnes&Noble.

SYNOPSIS

Barrett Bloom is hoping college will be a fresh start after a messy high school experience. But when school begins on September 21st, everything goes wrong. She’s humiliated by the know-it-all in her physics class, she botches her interview for the college paper, and at a party that night, she accidentally sets a frat on fire. She panics and flees, and when she realizes her roommate locked her out of their dorm, she falls asleep in the common room.

The next morning, Barrett’s perplexed to find herself back in her dorm room bed, no longer smelling of ashes and crushed dreams. It’s September 21st. Again. And after a confrontation with Miles, the guy from Physics 101, she learns she’s not alone—he’s been trapped for months.

When her attempts to fix her timeline fail, she agrees to work with Miles to find a way out. Soon they’re exploring the mysterious underbelly of the university and going on wild, romantic adventures. As they start falling for each other, they face the universe’s biggest unanswered question yet: what happens to their relationship if they finally make it to tomorrow?

MY OPINION

After reading this book, I can honestly say that See You Yesterday is now going to be a comfort read for me. The book really encapsulates a typical experience for so many young people starting college albeit having a lot of time travel in the plot. The main character Barrett starts her college experience off on the wrong foot, her first day being a disaster. But, when she wakes up on the same day again, she realises that she’ll have a lot of ways to change the day. And the way Rachel Lynn Solomon writes about her thoughts and feelings made it so easy and simple to read, and also relatable and heartwarming to anyone who feels like they didn’t have good college experiences, Barrett definitely eases the experience.

Also, the way she decided to juxtapose that simple difficulty that Barrett, and later learned classmate Miles, experienced with the complexity of time really tied the whole overall message of the book together, and makes for a great reader experience. Every small mishap they had which my have damaged their short-lived college reputation, was met with a huge discovery about time, and the loop they got stuck in, That life is so much more than your mistakes and that it’s important to see past them and still live your life how you want!

I thought that a really interesting part of this book was that the two protagonists, Barrett and Miles, really antithesised eachother in their methods of coming to terms with their situation. Barrett was an aspiring journalist, so really tried to use her investigative reporting skills by talking to people, while Miles was solely focused on fact and logic from textbooks. The two methods didn’t necessarily compliment eachother like a typical romance book, but what it did do was allow eachother to see from the others perspective (again, another moral message of this book) so when they did finally come together, their union was so much more meaningful and really changed how they acted in the final third of the book as they kept trying to solve their time loop.

One thing I really wanted to do this year, as a reader, was read more diverse stories – and this was a good starting point. There was a lot of representation in this book, Barrett was plus-sized and Jewish while Miles was also Jewish and also of Japanese heritage. One thing I would’ve loved to see was a bit more information about being a part of these communities, because we didn’t get to see as much of their personal lives as I would’ve liked, and it also would’ve just been nice for my own awareness! But, I also loved how the representation wasn’t necessarily a big deal, because in a away it shouldn’t be. Naturally, there should be people in every story representing different people from all communities – because that’s how society is, naturally diverse and there shouldn’t have to be any movement for the media to be the same . so I hope to read more books like this!

I think the overarching plot of being stuck in a time loop is so fascinating to readers – and can really make for good book conversations. What would you do if you were stuck in a time loop? Barrett and Miles have such different approaches, but it’s really a message to readers as to how they would go about a repetition of life, where everything resets after 24 hours. Both protagonists definitely change their approaches, (doing acts of goodness, living life to the fullest, finding revenge etc!) Ultimately learning more about themselves.

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Thank you everyone so much for reading, I really hope you enjoyed this review – the book was so interesting. Let me know your thoughts below in the comments!

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