"There are so many times I think about a decision I've made and wonder, "What if I had done it differently? Who would I be? What would my life be like? What if . . . ?"" (Nyelle Preston)
What If has an interesting premise. Cal Logan hasn't had contact with his childhood friend Nicole Bentley since they graduated from high school. At a coffee shop, he bumps into Nyelle Preston who looks exactly like Nicole. The story is basically about finding out who Nyelle Preston is, whether she is Nicole Bentley or not and if she is Nicole, what made her become Nyelle.
What If is a carefully constructed book. The author put time and effort into planning her story. This book weaves between multiple POV's and the past and present. The past is told in flashbacks when Cal and his friends were children. I don't usually like flashbacks, but these flashbacks allows me to care about characters such as Richelle and Nicole, who don't really feature in the present day narration. However, I find the past childhood narration, when the children were in fourth to sixth grade, unrealistic when it came to being and acting like children. Their actions and thought processing is mature and adult-like.
Cal Logan is the main character in What If. He's currently going to college and is one of those nice guys that girls would take home to meet their parents. Cal had a passive personality that is atypical from all the bad boy/alpha male characters that I generally find in new adult fiction. Cal's personality brought back bad memories from a time where I couldn't stand up for myself, couldn't say no, wasn't assertive, tried to please everybody and allowed people to walk all over me like a doormat. My dislike of Cal's character, even although realistic (I was him once upon a time), is due to an extremely personal nature.
Cal is a college student, but he only goes to about three college classes, is late for his classes, never studies and focuses on his assignments, spends plenty of time at parties and coffee shops and doesn't care about his school life. Cal also starts to have an unhealthy obsession with Nyelle. He always thinks about about her, always wanders what she's doing, is late for classes and sometimes doesn't go to them so that he can bump into her. When he is rarely in class he can't concentrate because he is thinking about her. She takes over his life. This annoys me to no end!
So who is this super-special Nyelle? Nyelle is a girl who would look beautiful even if she wore a garbage bag, doesn't know that she's beautiful, has a mysterious past and gorgeous, special-looking blue eyes (It's nice to see a female with soul searching eyes). She is also a manic-pixie dream girl stereotype without the pixie hair cut. I've never read a book where I liked the maniac-pixie dream girl character and this book is not an exception. Nyelle is made to be too quirky and fun and ends up being over-the-top, pretentious and fake.
Rae is my favourite character in the What If. She's blunt, angry and honest and is someone I would definitely want as a friend. I also like Cal's family dynamics (especially with his mother) and wish that I could have seen more of that.
What If has a mystery aspect to it. A mystery that revolves around why childhood friends stopped being friends and who Nyelle Preston is. However, this mystery is overshadowed by romance, could have easily been solved if there wasn't miscommunication and constructs something complex to explain something simple and this makes the "reveal" anti-climatic and predictable. I figured out the mystery somewhere around the middle of the book. This "reveal", which is supposed to make me feel emotional, does nothing to me at all. Maybe that's because I'm a cold-hearted machine or something.
"You can't make it go away by pretending nothing happened." (Cal Logan)
Rebecca Donovan puts effort into creating an amazing story and this story portrays that she sincerely wants to connect with her readers. What If is a book about friendship, pain and second chances. It's a book with a great premise and themes, but the execution when it came to the characters and the mystery aspect draws no emotions out of me.