I love that this story branches out from the norm, exploring open relationships and all the complications that are involved in them, but for me I felt too detached from the main characters to have much stake in the outcome.

I started this book around is publication date, and didn’t finish. I gave it another shot in audio this month, and decided to take it off my TBR pile for good.

The book is well written, but I cringed at how naive Kathryn and Chris are. Kathryn’s decision to encourage Chris to act on his “crush” on Emily was stupid, and I felt like she had only herself to blame when the crush developed into a relationship. Chris was really pushed into acting on his attraction to Emily, but he didn’t have to, and so I felt he shared the blame for weakening his relationship with Kathryn. As the book developed, I just wanted them to break-up and spare themselves and the reader the pain.

While I definitely enjoyed my experience reading this book, there are some issues with pacing and character development in the middle that left me wanting just a bit more.

I thought this was a good exploration of poly, and what it means to have a relationship that doesn't fit into a traditional mold. The grey area and pain around changing your relationship was really relatable. I wish that it had ended differently, that they hadn't just realized they weren't what the other needed anymore, I would have really liked to see them make poly work for them.

Open relationships are becoming more normal in this day and age so it was nice to see a book tackle this type living arrangement. While it may not be for me, I do know people who are living this life and absolutely satisfied and happy in it. It's not for me, nor is it for everybody, but what two people decide to do in their relationship with each other is between them and no one else and should be respected by those who may not follow in the same line.

I can see why some people wouldn't find this storyline plausible but I think the author did a great job in showing the human side to how each individual reacted to the first steps into this foray and beyond. The friendships forged over complete honesty and the willingness to try such a thing was heartwarming. I loved it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/art-matters-when-books-can-save-your-life_us_59a95ba2e4b0d0c16bb52451


✪ Zoey Leigh Peterson’s charming debut is a decidedly contemporary affair. Next Year, For Sure centers on a couple whose desire to make each other happy leads to an open-marriage experiment, but what happens is the last thing either of them expects. Intelligent, witty and engaging company.

I enjoyed this one! Quick and interesting read!At first, I was frustrated with how sometimes the characters were not communicating directly and openly about how they were feeling .But on the other it was realistic .

Zoey Leigh Peterson’s debut fiction asks the question: When is the best time to add a plus-one to your relationship?

“She’s always sad, mom. We’re both always sad.
Chris wonders how long this has been true. How long they’ve been trapped in this sadness together.
You’re not sad, his mother says. It’s called being an adult.”

Zoey Leigh Peterson breaks down a break-up month by month in her debut novel, Next Year for Sure and, like a good friend of the couple, she doesn’t pick sides. Turns out, adding a plus-one to a stable abet slightly boring relationship does or doesn’t work out according to who in the mix you ask and either next year or never is the best time to turn two into three or four.

Wendy Ward
http://wendyrward.tumblr.com/

Taking things for granted never turns out well.. Never take things or humans for granted.. aka relationships.. The major crux of this amazing novel..

Originally I believe this to be YA. I dunno why but I did before reading it and requesting it.  This was a really good adult contemporary. When I started progressing into the story I was more and more engrossed and really entranced by it.

I loved our female lead and to see her getting killed by letting the man in her life go for another girl was really difficult but it was a clever thing to do in the long run. She shouldn't have let herself through it but she loved her man and she could do anything for him even if it got her killed figuratively everyday..

I liked all the characters and how engaging they made the whole story. I loved the writing and I will be reading more from Zoey.

I really enjoyed this book. And its adult intricacies. I dunno why I wanted a YA contemporary in the first place-- it maybe because I wanted to get out of my real life. But this book made me more morally alert.

I would really recommend this book to adults gladly.

Special thanks to Netgalley and Scribner/Simon and Schuster for this review copy..

I hate to think I'm too old or prudish or something but I has a really hard time relating to how Kathryn, Chris, and Emily dealt with Chris' attraction to Emily. The writing carried this through even when the characters were irritating, which I think was really the crux of my issue with this novel. It is definitely a realistic situation with a very intriguing solution. THanks to Scribner for the ARC as I'm not sure I would have picked this up on my own. Peterson has a nice way of portraying two different perspectives and that's a real plus. Try this for a different view of love and how it changes.

I requested and read this book because Jann Arden tweeted about it and when I read the overview I was intrigued. Next Year For Sure is about an open relationship, not something that I know about nor do I think is something I could engage in. It is complicated and you can never go back. I liked the main female character, Kathryn, and getting to know her as she grew throughout the novel. And how I grew to dislike the main male character, how the things I found endearing at the beginning became stifling and suffocating.

I'm glad I read this book! Thanks NetGalley for the advanced copy.

Next Year, For Sure by Zoey Leigh Peterson is a quick read that delves into the always interesting topic of open relationships. Chris and Kathryn have been together for many years but recently Chris has developed a crush on a girl named Emily. At Kathyrn's urging Chris calls Emily and asks her out on a date. From there the relationship deepens and soon all involved are wondering just what will happen next. Definitely a thought-provoking read. Enjoy!

After nine years together, Chris and Kathryn have survived the seven year itch, devised their own code words (potatoes = it's time to get up), and committed to each other in every sense aside from the legal. They feel married. They act married. They believe in their hearts that they are married.

Lately, though, Chris has felt drawn to Emily, a young woman he meets at the laundromat. He confesses this to Kathryn who suggests that he ask her out on a date.

I know.

Not quite the reaction I would have had, either.

But Kathryn feels differently. If Chris goes out with this girl, maybe it will do nothing more than show him definitively that he and Kathryn belong together.

I know.

Not quite the line of reasoning i would have had, either.

You know - long before Chris and Kathryn - that this is a bad, bad idea.

What makes this such an interesting concept, though, is how Zoey Leigh Peterson presents it. She puts you in the heads of Chris and Kathryn, helping you see Chris's somewhat feckless pre-Kathryn approach to love and Kathryn's passivity. He historically moves on to his next love while he's still with his current, whereas she allows love to come to her rather than move toward it herself. Peterson uses these track records to foreshadow some things, but she also uses it to show you how people can refuse to let their pasts predict their futures.

I appreciated that nothing is too precious to Peterson. She doesn't love her characters too much to conceal their flaws. There are times when you will want to shout at Chris and Kathryn. Their behavior and decisions will leave you furious and frustrated. Emily is the weak link, though. She presents a sort of shared temptation: she has to be alluring enough to entice Chris into potentially jeopardizing his relationship with Kathryn, and she also has to be substantive enough for Kathryn to essentially use her to test Chris. Unfortunately, Emily is neither. She comes across too flakey, too one-dimensional. The idea of her, though - the idea that one person could be brought into a relationship to challenge its foundation - is interesting, and Peterson makes the most of that.

I'd love to know what you think of this book, particularly its ending, so please come back, hit up the comments, and let's discuss.

Perfect beach or lazy Saturday novel. Hard to put down!

What’s great about Zoe Leigh Peterson’s debut is its relative lack of the ick factor. There’s a certain kind of contemporary American novel – usual devoted to modern relationships – that’s just too cute, too neat, too sweet.
Peterson’s novel is neat, but in a rather more original way. The writing is fresher, the insights (about friendship, about essential character) just a little more acute. It adds up to a package that is short, satisfying and appetite whetting for more.
The central conceit is simple: Kathryn and Chris have been a great couple for nine years. But Chris has a tendency towards loving multiple women simultaneously and now he’s fallen for Emily. What to do?
Subsequent developments are funny and largely inoffensive, although Emily is a little too good to be true, and female readers might find Chris’s undisciplined affections somewhat trying. In the end, though, it’s Kathryn who leads the way, even as the author reveals her preference for fluidity rather than fixed outcomes.
So, congratulations to Peterson for an edgily up-to-date version of romantic fiction which offers multiple delights, delivered with lightness and grace. Perhaps the novel is a fairytale of West Coast living, but it’s a benign one and this reader would happily consume another.

Let me start by saying that I almost quit this book many times throughout the first 50% of the book, and at that point, I would have given it one star, but it did pick up at the end.

At the end of the day, Next Year, for Sure might just not be the right fit for me. It's a clever idea - a couple enters into a polyamorous relationship and deals with the challenges - but the way it was done was not right for me. My challenges are as follows:

1) The book jumps right into things. We have no introduction to the main couple, Chris and Kathryn, and we are immediately thrown into the polyamory dilemma. I guess this is fine, but it made them so hard to feel sympathy for them as the novel progresses. I don't care for their relationship so why should I care when they are struggling? I would have appreciated if they have been developed more.
2) Going off of my first point, I feel like none of the characters were very developed, leaving me apathetic at most. I will admit that some character development progressed more towards the end of the novel, but it wasn't enough at that point. The development needed to happen earlier.
3) I couldn't stand the writing style, but that is just a taste preference. It was very simplistic, yet also artsy if that even makes sense. Just not for me.
4) Again, harping back on character development but in a different way, Chris and Kathryn had no communication as a couple and their actions seemed implausible for any real life couple. Like they didn't sit and talk this out properly before doing it, really?! Although, hey, maybe I am just living in my own idealized bubble and some couples really don't communicate.

Despite all my challenges with this book, I do think some people might really enjoy it as it is a different take on any sort of relationship book I have ever read, and for that, I applaud the author. There are very few relationship books that I have seen that equally portray both characters and neutral, rather than one being good and one being bad. I also appreciated the ending as it was a very apt choice to close the style of this novel.

Hmm... Maybe I am talking myself up to 2.5 stars... I'll keep it at 2.

Anyways, give this book a chance. It wasn't for me, but there certainly was something refreshing about it that I haven't seen it before. And hey, I read it in one night, so it can't be all bad?

2.5 stars
I'm too old for this book. Or too old fashioned. The book’s premise was difficult for me to swallow. Chris and Kathryn love each other but she's okay with him getting “crushes” on other women. I'm not sure I can really buy into that. I get that you can have a crush on someone else, it's the acting on it I struggled with. And giving your significant other permission to act on it? So, from the get go, I was having trouble with the two main characters. Kathryn believes she's acting like a Joni Mitchell song, all independent and strong. But the Joni Mitchell songs I remember all involved heartbreak. The book poses some interesting questions about what love means and what it means to be in a committed relationship. It's just that I didn't agree with Kathryn’s conclusions and that impacted my ability to like the book. And I didn't care for Chris, but I did like his mom (probably because we're the same generation). The book also deals with what it means to be a good friend and accepting what our friends do. I actually found the parts that dealt with the friendship between Sharon and Kathryn more believable than the relationship between Chris and Kathryn. I won't go into where the book goes, but you can see certain things coming from far away.

I give Peterson credit for her writing style. It's straightforward and appealing. The book moves along at a good pace.

My thanks to netgalley and Scribner for an advance copy of this book.

This was a rather intriguing story with an ending I very much enjoyed.

The writing was challenging. It had little punctuation, with no quotation marks offsetting speech ever. While I think this can be an incredibly effective technique, it distracted from the actual premise of the book. Instead of adding meaning to the story, it made it feel as though the author were trying to be overly literary.

Emily as a character felt too perfect. I wanted her to screw up, to do something wrong, but she instead continually did what one would expect her to be doing as the perfect version of her character type would.

Kathryn felt a tad uninvited, and I was sad for her, too. She had lost friends because of a previous relationship and it took this book to see her really socialise again and even then she lost one of the few people who she had been close to prior. Reading about her felt a little bit depressing.

I really appreciated the honesty in Kathryn and Chris's relationship. It was refreshing to see characters talk about their crushes on other people and to understand that love isn't always linear. I was almost disappointed by the ending though I think it was well deserved.

If the concept really intrigues you, read this book, but despite enjoying the plot I found the actual telling to be dry.