We Can't Keep Meeting Like This

April 26, 2021
Having grown up with her family’s wedding planning business, Borrowed + Blue, Quinn Berkowitz knows the ropes, including sanding the bridal party’s shoes and how to play the harp. Too bad she doesn’t know how to tell her folks that she’s not interested in joining their business, or that her parents’ six-month separation—and subsequent failure to talk about it—has made her doubt marriage, and love, altogether. In the summer after her senior year, white, Jewish Quinn, who has generalized anxiety disorder and OCD, also faces the return of a childhood friend, Egyptian American Tarek Mansour, whose family caters many of the weddings that hers plans. They haven’t spoken since he left for college a year ago, after Quinn confessed her crush on him and then never heard back. The two eventually restart their friendship—and more—navigating food poisoning, wedding crises, and tension about whether a huge romantic like Tarek and a commitment-phobe like Quinn can make things work. Solomon (Today, Tonight, Tomorrow) shows how Quinn’s brain can get in her way, expertly weaving anxiety and depression with the love and the pleasures and terrors of trying to find one’s path. Ages 12–up. Agent: Laura Bradford, Bradford Literary.