When We Were Young Review

From the author of Something to Live For, a nostalgic, heart-warming story of two long-lost friends who embark on a 184-mile walk of the Thames Path in order to find their way back to the truth, and to their friendship.

How do you move forward...when all you want to do is go back?

Joel and Theo haven't spoken since the summer they turned sixteen, but that's about to change.

From the outside Joel looks like the picture of success: a TV scriptwriter with a smash hit who's still together and in love with his teenage sweetheart, Amber. But he's falling apart at the seams. He's headed home to reconnect with best friend Theo--to get back to the start of it all.

Theo has been living in his parents' shed, nursing a broken heart and a wounded ego, convinced life can't get any worse. Then he gets evicted on his 30th birthday. He thinks he's done with the real world - until it shows up on his doorstep...

One of them is keeping a secret, and the other is living a lie. But can the promise they once made to walk all 184 miles of the Thames Path help them find their way back to the truth--and to their friendship?

General Impressions

I started 'When We Were Young' really excited about this story: it's not often that I get two read about a story focusing on the friendship and inner lives of two men instead of some kind of romance.

Even though I picked this book up because I need something light and quick, I found myself really enjoying not only the story but the main characters. I was just flying through the pages, jumping between the present and the flashbacks from the time they met as children to their growing apart in their teenage years to the end of their friendship as they became adults. Their friendship was as entertaining and heartbreaking as their growing series of misunderstandings but I really, really was rooting for them the entire time.

What made this book so special for me was that it wasn't only a book about male friendship but about the way boys are raised ultimately created men that feel isolated, uncomfortable talking about their insecurities or even ashamed to ask for help which ultimately has a cost on their mental health. It was really heartbreaking to see the evolution of these two boys that were the happiest in each other company and were unafraid, to be honest, loving and open with each other to see how toxic masculinity slowly poisoned not only their relationship with each other but changed who they were completely and it wasn't until they met again that some inklings of who they truly were started to peak through the walls they had erected.

I would have been happy enough with this book except that towards the end, all of those discussions about friendship, communication and masculinity were forgotten which I felt negated everything this book could have been, to focus instead on saving some rich guy's life because of course, he was a nice person all along.

Conclusions

Although I have some reservations about the ending, this is a book that I'll not forget for a multitude of reasons including this: there's this small scene in which someone thinks Joel and Theo are a couple and instead of correcting them, they lean into it, not as an internal joke, but as two people that are secure in their masculinity and friendship so they don't care how they are perceived by others. I had never seen that kind of allyship in a book where none of the characters was queer, so that was really nice.

Thanks to Orion Books for sending me this book proof.

Rating: 3/5