Rife with Jewish representation, Kate Goldbeck's debut was unique and an enemies to friends to lovers story unlike any I've read before. Inspired by When Harry Met Sally (I guess I should finally watch that...), Ari and Josh are a couple that will stay with me long after finishing this book. Beyond the Jewish representation, there is also bisexual representation (ahem, Josh and Ari meet when they are both sleeping with the same woman...) and Goldbeck handles this in such a way as to avoid tokenization of any sort. My only qualm with this one was that it felt about 100 pages too long.

I say with confidence that I look forward to reading more from Goldbeck in the future.

Thank you to The Dial Press for an advanced copy. All opinions are my own.

This book is a masterpiece and Kate Goldbeck is a rare talent. Funny and heartwarming and angsty with some of the best banter and dialogue I've ever read. This is a book that feels REAL. Every character is so lived in and I felt like I was watching the lives of people I knew. Just genius and I'm very excited to see what Goldbeck does next.

When Harry Met Sally is my favorite movie of all time, so I was really excited to read this one and I'm sad I didn't love it as much as I wanted to.

All in all, this one fell flat for me and I really think it all boils down to the characters. I found them unlikeable and not in a "oh I cant wait to see their character grow" way where I’m excited to keep reading, but there were so many moments with each of them where I actually said "yikes" out loud. There was just a certain charm that was lacking in this and I wasn’t honestly sure I wanted the main characters to end up together (not something you want to happen when reading a romance).

This book had so much going for it and I really enjoyed the writing style of this author and I will definitely be checking out her future books. This particular one just wasn’t working for me.

You, Again by @kategoldbeck is a witty and unconventional love story! 🧡

Blurb: Ari, a free-spirited struggling comedian, likes to keep things casual, and never sleeps over after hooking up. Josh, born-and-bred Manhattanite, has ambitious plans to take the culinary world by storm, to find The One and live happily-ever-after.

After a confrontational first meeting (at the apartment of the woman they are both sleeping with), Ari and Josh never expect their paths to cross again, but years later, as they're both reeling from ego-bruising breakups, a chance encounter leads to a surprising connection: friendship. Turns out, spending time with your former nemesis can be fun when you're both too sad and miserable to hate each other.

And as odd as it seems, they become friends-without-benefits, finding comfort in late night Netflix binges, swiping through each other's online dating profiles, and bickering endlessly on their phones across boroughs. It's better than romance. Until one night, the unspoken boundaries of their platonic relationship begin to blur...

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

This book gave off “When Harry Met Sally” vibes and I am HERE FOR IT!!! I love the relationship between Ari and Josh because it was honest and real. The queer representation was super amazing and done in a respectful way. I cannot tell you how many times I laughed and cried throughout the book, it was that great!!! Overall, please pick up You, Again when it releases on September 12th, 2023. Thank you @netgalley for giving me the opportunity to review this ARC!!! 😊🍂✨

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It’s been a long time since I have read a book that I needed to finish in one day! I couldn’t wait to read each chapter just knowing it was going to be even better then the one I just read. The witty banter between Ari and Josh was just perfect. I can’t even count how many times I laughed out loud. Don’t get me started on the many smiles that would make anyone think I was getting a text from someone special. I can’t believe this is Kate’s debut book. Absolutely perfect❤️

The main characters are unlikable, Josh is insufferable and pretentions and Ari is unprofessionnnal and flighty. The timeline is messy, jumping for three years at a time from one chapter to the next. I wanted to like this, but the characters are so unlikable that I just can't.

Thank you to Random House for allowing me to read an ARC!

So, there's been a recent trend in romcoms of new releases that feel much more ADULT than your average romcom. I'd cite Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld and Sammy Espinoza's Last Review by Tehlor Kay Mejia as examples of some other favorites amidst that specific vibe. You, Again by Kate Goldbeck fits RIGHT in with that group, and I could not be more grateful to add to the list!

This is a romcom that IS very funny and very romantic, but the characters are viscerally human. This means that they do many things that you're going to find frustrating, and you might not even particularly LIKE the main character at times, but it's so incredibly worth it. Our female lead, Ari, is a quick-witted, enneagram 7 (this is not canon, I just know it in my heart) who juggles a variety of gig-economy odd jobs to scrape together New York City rent. Josh is a chef whose father was the owner of a longstanding deli in the East Village, Brodsky. Throughout the story, we see Josh desperately trying to carve his own path and find a place for himself, as well as the space formerly known as the Brodsky, that fulfills him. The Bear enjoyers lemme hear y'all make some noise!!!!

Perhaps the best thing about this story is that we see both main characters fail...brutally. On professional levels, on personal levels, on emotional levels, and most definitely on relationship levels. We see our fair share of knee-jerk trauma reactions from both of them that will have you cringing, but Kate Goldbeck does a great job of providing so much color from their respective backgrounds that I really felt like I understood. Even in her worst moments, Ari felt like when you have a friend who does something objectively crazy, but you just kind of shrug and say, "Sorry, she's going through something!"

The timeline of this story jumps around a ton, as we speed through the first 8 years or so that the main characters orbit each other. Generally speaking, I don't typically enjoy this format, but found myself really buying into it here! Something about seeing the slices of life from different eras of each person's life added so much to their characters in a way that felt truly worth it. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that Ari is queer, and queer in such a way that we actually get to SEE! Not that it makes it less valid if we don't, but I loved that we got to see glimpses at her relationships with women, and consistent commentary on how it colors her relationship to Josh, rather than the usual label mention without much involvement otherwise.

If it wasn't painfully clear, I really, really enjoyed this, and I'm excited for it to officially release!

Overall, I thought this book was written really well and the author’s voice was unique and present throughout.
There’s a lot of fun banter and hilarious moments that were memorable. I enjoyed the inclusivity of the characters.
I found the female main character to be lacking in any real depth. Her entire personality revolves around sex, to the point that she was almost a caricature. Ari wants to have sex with everyone that she sees. Ari DOES have sex with almost everyone she sees. And when she isn’t having sex, she’s thinking about or talking about sex.
The reader is meant to understand that Ari is emotionally unavailable and pushes people away to avoid getting hurt. However, there’s not a lot of back story as to why this is. There’s a paragraph about her mother abandoning her as a child, but I would have liked a little more background info to understand this aspect of Ari’s character.
The male main character, Josh, also had some concerning actions. He’s described in many scenes as the typical cis white man who is on top of the world and gets whatever he wants, while writing off the viewpoints of a female person of color. Josh seemed to romanticize all of his relationships, desperate to settle down. He was very pushy with Ari about moving their relationship from platonic to romantic, even after her telling him that she didn’t want this multiple times.
The pacing of this story felt a little off to me. The angst and relationship struggles lasted for about 90% of the book, and we finally get our happy ending in the last chapter or two. I did enjoy reading this book, but the questionable likeability of both main characters made me care less about their outcome in the end.

You, Again is being marketed as a romcom, gender swapped When Harry Met Sally but in my opinion this is way more of a contemporary fiction with a romantic subplot than a romance novel.

The two main characters, Ari and Josh we VERY hard to root for until probably the 65% mark and in my opinion it should not take that long to like the main couple of a romance book over half-way through the story. Ari and Josh were both very insufferable and really did not have any form of character growth besides them finally getting together at the end. Ari almost felt like a caricature of a bisexual female comedian and Josh was such an asshole at some parts of the story it was infuriating.

I'm giving this 3 stars because while I definitely had problems with the characters, the banter and funny quotes were some of the funniest I've read and the author was able to win me over at the end. I think if this was being pushed as a fiction novel I would've had better expectations.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ebook review copy. All opinions are my own.

I LOVE this book so much! The cover is dreamy fall goodness. The words are funny and sad and witty from start to finish.

I absolutely love how the two MC’s meet, make things weird, then don’t speak again until.. repeat!

Josh is a very grumpy chef. Ari is.. sarcastic and sassy.. with a dash of all the talents just working her way through life.. the perfect match right?! For some reason I kept relating to Josh and his attitude. It felt real and raw, I respected him more for it. Sometimes, life just makes you *that* way.

Enemies to lovers.. meet cute.. broken lovers.. gosh this one hurt but felt so good too!

How is this a debut?! I want more Kate immediately!!

I can see why so many readers love this book! I'm going to be honest it took me a couple tries of reading and putting it down and then picking it back up again weeks later to get through it, but I'm really glad I did end up finishing it! The beginning was a little slow, very angsty and the two MC's don't see each other a lot at first, which was probably the reason it took me while to get into it. I pushed through though because it took place in New York and I just couldn't pass up the opportunity of the perfect subway read.

While the slowest of slow burns was quite frustrating in the beginning it ends up paying off so well in the end! The build up of them being rivals to friends to lovers is just *chefs kiss*. As you can see I did end up rating it 4 stars in the end because it is a beautifully written love story and is probably the prefect fall read if you're in your angsty indie rom-com era.

"You, Again" is a zippy & dazzling modern love story, with all the heart of a timeless romcom! I adore Ari & Josh: two people who are a complete and utter MESS, and I root for both of them the whole way through. Kate Goldbeck creates lively characters with such real hangups & flaws, making real mistakes, that kept me so deeply invested in their journey. Bravo!!
There's a deliberate magic in how Ari & Josh's interactions are so frequently (hilariously!) lewd right from the very beginning, so there's an incredible payoff by the time we're shown a love scene! I was literally kicking my feet in giddy excitement! I was hooked from Ari & Josh's very first "meet-ugly" (meet un-cute?) and their quirks & oddities continued to grow on me. When the angsty rollercoaster ride came to a head, I had to read through the end in one breathless sitting. The romantic ending had me crying in a heap on my kitchen floor! Such a moving and rewarding book, sweet as black & white cookies, and just as heart-nourishing as Josh's matzo ball soup.
I loved You, Again. I can't wait to read it again!

"Maybe being in love is knowing that you’d live it all over again—every part, suffering included—to get right back to the place where you’re standing." Hi its me... a person obsessed with this book. I am serious this is one of the best books I have ever read that perfectly encapsulates the emotions behind grief and love and also healing. This is the first book that I have read by Kate Goldbeck and I would do anything to read it again for the first time. I absolutely need a physical copy of this book on my shelf because as someone with depression and who has lost a lot of people in their life, I found this book to be so healing. In my eyes this book is everything I could have wanted and is absolutely perfect.

i think what <i>you, again</i> gets so right is the idea that there is no correct time to accept love. this comes up a lot with people who are depressed (in light of my personal experience and my experience reflecting on friendship dynamics throughout my life) because when you're in a low, it's hard to think that someone would want to stay through all that which makes for one hell of an emotional crux. i stayed up longer than i want to admit reading this if it's an indication of how much <i>you, again</i> wrecked me.

(if anything though, i would've loved more of a build up of the small intimacies that friendships often have, but this is a strong debut.)

Going into this book and expecting a traditional romance would be a mistake.

The best comps that I have for this are like - the movie Palm Springs (without the speculative element) meets Girls or something Greta Gerwig could have written and directed.

This isn't an overwrought romantic thing with your typical duo of aesthetically pleasing people making cow eyes at each other for three hundred pages until the big kiss at the end. This is about two people struggling through the curve balls that life has thrown at them - the sense of treading water that you get in your early twenties, when loving someone isn't enough to make them stay, trying to find your identity, the pressure to live out the dreams that your parents decide for you instead of the ones you have for yourself.

Everyone in this is MESSY, a commitment-phobic quippy comedian that barrels through her life as though she can physically ring what she wants out of it like water from a damp wash cloth. One day, she bumps into a guy on the street to harangue him into a financial donation for bobcats. And then, that same guy shows up at her apartment ready to make dinner for her roommate.

Over the years they encounter each other until finally they meet in a shared space of loneliness - Ari going through a painful divorce and Josh having made a great leap of faith to turn the legacy of his father's restaurant into something more for himself and being viciously ripped apart for it. Then they slowly begin to heal each other.

This felt very New York and it was witty and fast-talking, but didn't shy away from the everyday human tragedies of just trying to make it through. Felt like the fiction quivalent of "but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need."

Loved this.

I started You, Again without knowing too much about it. A few book friends have been raving about it on social media, so I figured I'd have to move it up on my tbr. Once I started this book I could not stop reading it!

What you can expect to find in You Again
-enemies to friends to lovers
-he's grumpy, she's slightly less grumpy
-bi rep
-fated mates (they run into each other every few years)
-disastrous meet cute
-swoony & angsty

When Josh discovers that his grilfriend's roommate - Ari - is occasionally sometimes a "friend with benefit"- when he comes over to make her dinner he immediately dislikes her. They bicker and fight the entire time Josh is making dinner.

Then starts their unfortunate run-ins with one another every few years. And their run ins eventually become a tentative friendship after both Josh and Ari are coming out of serious relationships. Ari is going through a divorce after her wife dumped her for someone else and Josh feels lost without someone to call his own.

There are so many things I loved about this book. The way Kate Goldbeck can make me laugh while also making my heart race in sweet/sexy/spicy scene. The way I connected with both characters and their group of friends. The fact that I felt the hurt, anger and loneliness in both Ari and Josh and yet I was SCREAMING for them to get together!

I have literal paragraphs highlighted because they resonated with me so profoundly. Obviously I can't put into words how much I loved this book.

If there's one book you need to add to your fall tbr, please let it be this one! I can't wait to read whatever Kate Goldbeck writes next.

I recommend this book to readers that enjoy friends to lovers rom-coms with a heavy dose of realistic romance and not bookish romance. Personally, this book should have been an instant hit with me as it has all of the tropes I immensely enjoy, however I spent most of the time waiting for a turning point that fell flat when it was delivered.

SPOILER-ISH: I do think this was influenced by the set up as our main characters do not start their romance until almost the very end.

With that. It is an enjoyable easy read. I think people that like second chances romance would really it.

I read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
I can tell that a lot of people will like this book. Its full of angst and drama, but unfortunately, it went a bit overboard for me. There was quite a bit of time in between when the characters would see each other, and I sort of felt that Ari dominated Josh a bit. To me, it wasn't as sweet as When Harry met Sally.
I can why others would enjoy this though :)

This book was fantastic - it was such an interesting premise and the characters were very well developed. I loved that the two main characters were so flawed (for lack of a better term) - or rather, they were shown as being very, very human. It made the conclusion of the story that much more satisfying. I highly recommend this book, and will absolutely be looking for more from Kate Goldbeck in the future.

This book was so good! It was very emotional and realistic; the characters were extremely complex, and I really enjoyed watching them figure themselves out. The story was very well written, and I thought it was a really good debut! The dialogue and banter were fun, and I loved the dynamic between the two main characters. The time jumps were a really good idea, and I liked how the story spanned over quite a long time, rather than simply taking place in a short amount of time. Overall, I would definitely recommend this book!!