We Are Inevitable

**As an Amazon associate I earn from qualifying purchases. 

We Are Inevitable

Gayle Forman

‘I got this whole-body feeling… it was like a message from future me to present me, telling me that in some way we weren’t just bound to happen, that we had, in some sense, already happened. It felt… inevitable.’

So far, the inevitable hasn’t worked out so well for Aaron Stein.

While his friends have gone to college and moved on with their lives, Aaron’s been left behind in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, running a failing bookshop with his dad, Ira. What he needs is a lucky break, the good kind of inevitable.

And then he meets Hannah. Incredible Hannah – magical, musical, brave and clever. Could she be the answer? And could they – their relationship, their meeting – possibly be the inevitable Aaron’s been waiting for?

-Excerpt taken from Goodreads.

Check Goodreads to see the book’s ratings.

My Opinion

“…when you watch, you are a spectator, but when you read, you’re a participant.”

(4 / 5) I read If I Stay years ago and loved it. I’ve read it many times since and still love it. I love the writing so much that I started to read all Forman’s books. However, none ever did it for me again. Until now. 

Finally, Forman has found that deep, aching writing again. She easily pulls you in and makes you love these flawed characters. These characters that are so real you can feel their emotions. A story that hits your heart with the ache of reality and pain. I’m so happy she found a story to bring that out again.

“I didn’t buy it before, when she said books and songs were different ways of telling a story. I’m starting to believe it now.”

The descriptions of music are what brought me into If I Stay. This book is about books. Books and what they give us, how they heal us and why. It’s satisfying when someone can so accurately portray your own feelings. It is also about music and how both are telling stories that we need to hear.

“Because the hard part of falling down is not the falling, or the getting back up. It’s seeing what happens to the people you fall on. You get bruised; they get flattened.”

This is about love, the stupid things we do to the people we love and the healing our hearts go through to make us better.

Content Summary: 19 F words with language throughout. There is smoking and drinking but each character is college age or older, so while it may not be legal, it’s better than if it was the target age for most YA books. Addiction is something that is talked about often. The severity might be too much for some and the characters have been to rehab. A man (twenties or so?) is paralyzed and refers to not being able to have sexual relationships because of it. It goes into quite a bit of detail. There are kisses and a few crude comments, also one vague reference to a young man pleasuring himself. Grief is talked about throughout because a family member has died and the mother left the family.

Thank you to Penguin Teen for the gifted copy in exchange for an honest review.

The book releases June 1, 2021.

Detailed Content Review

Language 

F***- 19

H***- 14

S***- 47

A**- 16

B****-

D***- 14

Bas****- 1

Religious Cursing

J****- 1

Chr***- 1

G**- 6

L***-

Derogatory terms etc-

Dick 

Alcohol, Drugs, Smoking

A man has a serious drug addiction, and has been to rehab. 

A young man wonders if his dad smokes marajuana on walks. 

A man shoves tobacco in his lip and spits. 

A woman offers beer.  A young man declines, a man accepts. 

A woman and young man drink shots of whiskey. 

A man gets very drunk and falls off his chair. 

As a teenager, a man used to get drunk and watch a movie. 

A group of people discuss Ativan, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Zoloft and more. They discuss depression, anxiety, grief, panic attacks and the meds to use with them. 

A young man buys a man 2 beers. 

A young woman is sober but has been to rehab. A young man has a problem with this. 

A young woman rolls and smokes a cigarette. 

A young woman tells about getting addicted to painkillers. In 9th grade she snorted OxyContin. In 7th grade she would slip bourbon into her coffee. She took laxative pills and snorted Adderall, and also smoked dope. 

Intimacy, Sex, Immodesty

*Minimal LGBTQ+ aspects included* 

A man wants to see a doctor about fixing his sex life after being paralyzed; “…before my accident, I was a boner machine. Ten seconds of porn. Boom, I was hard!” He talks about his “junk” and how it doesn’t get hard except with touch. Sometimes it’s just the touch of a cat on his lap. They talk in detail about what he can and cannot do and what he’d like instead. 

A paralyzed man urinates himself. A young man helps him get undressed, cleaned and dressed. 

“…I beat off to the multiple ways we might’ve kept trying. As I wipe up the results with a towel…as I wipe up my jiz.”

“…gives me the stirrings of what I now know is a psychogenic boner.”

A young man kisses a young woman. 

A man very vaguely eludes to having sex in the bathroom with another man. 

A young woman and young man kiss. He spends the night at her place, no details. He kisses her and pulls her closer. Sex is implied but no details. 

“And there’s the locker room where I gave my first blow job to my boyfriend…”

A young man kisses a young woman. 

Violence, Weapons, Crime, Blood

A young man tries to punch a man and is held until he’s calm. He then elbows a man in the nose. 

Potentially Intense Themes

Previously, a young man was snowboarding and fell off a cliff. He is now in a wheelchair. 

A young man’s brother has died. The young man dreams of finding his brother that morning and his face is blue. His mom found him and screamed and screamed every morning and day. The brother found he was relieved his brother was dead. 

**Any quotes from the book are taken from the advance copy and therefore may not be fully accurate or correctly compare to the final copy of the book.

**As an Amazon associate I earn from qualifying purchases.