[Review] Maybe This Time by Kasie West

Maybe This Time by Kasie West 

Rating: 3 stars

Format: ARC

Published:July 9th 2019

Goodreads Synopsis:

One year. Nine events. Nine chances to . . . fall in love?
Weddings. Funerals. Barbecues. New Year's Eve parties. Name the occasion, and Sophie Evans will be there. Well, she has to be there. Sophie works for the local florist, so she can be found at every big event in her small hometown, arranging bouquets and managing family dramas.
Enter Andrew Hart. The son of the fancy new chef in town, Andrew is suddenly required to attend all the same events as Sophie. Entitled, arrogant, preppy Andrew. Sophie just wants to get her job done and finish up her sketches so she can apply to design school. But every time she turns around, there is Andrew, getting in her way and making her life more complicated. Until one day she wonders if maybe complicated isn't so bad after all . . .
Told over the course of one year and following Sophie from event to event, this delightful novel from master of romantic comedy Kasie West shows how love can blossom in unexpected places.

Sophie works at the local florist, when she'd rather be designing clothes, preparing for her dream to one day come true - to go to fashion design school in NYC. She meets Andrew Hart, whose father is a famous chef with a soured career. He now has a business that helps out up-and-coming new talent, such as Micah's dad, a caterer. Andrew Hart is his son, and has to follow his dad around for the whole year, meaning Sophie will be seeing a lot more of him at future events.

This story is told through the events in which Sophie and Andrew have to meet and work together. Sophie initially despises Andrew, and the feeling is seemingly mutual. Because the sections are set up in the form of months (as there's one event a month), the pacing of this story is rather fast-paced. There's a lot off-screen stuff that happens in between-these months, and occasionally, the characters have to fill in the gaps.


I feel like this monthly chapter format skewered the characterization and relationships. For instance, Micah gets into an argument with Sophie at one of the events, saying that this feeling has been building up for awhile, prompting them to not talk for a month. However, in the previous section, Micah brings up the issue and Sophie seemingly resolves it off-screen... but not really? There's a discontinuity between what the reader sees and what is happening in between the months.

With character, I felt it was hard to grasp any sense of character development or who some of the characters really were. Because we see the characters through Sophie's eyes, we often see them in a negative light (Jett Hart, Sophie's mom), making them very one-dimensional. I couldn't tell whether or not I was supposed to dislike them or root for them in the end. Their was never any resolution on Sophie's part when it came to her troubles with adults (her parents, Jett, etc), and I feel like even if there was a HEA in the end, the resolution should occur on-screen.

When it came to the romance, I didn't really buy it. I normally enjoy enemies to friends to lovers, but it felt like a romance that came together for the sake of the plot/time constraints, instead of any real chemistry. They kissed at perhaps the worst moment for romance, but that is beside the point.

Overall, this was an okay read, but it wasn't anything spectacular for me.