Say You'll Remember Me and The Night We Met

I read these two books in the span of like three days. And while they weren’t my favorite rom coms of all time, I enjoyed myself and got a bit too unproductive…oops.

Both Say You’ll Remember Me and The Night We Met are by Abby Jimenez, and are in the same series (the MMCs of the two books are best friends). 

I started with The Night We Met, even though it was the second book in the series. 

I didn’t have high hopes for the book - to be honest, I only downloaded The Night We Met because the synopsis revealed that it had one of my least favorite tropes and I wanted a good hate-read. But as I read it, I was instantly hooked and I finished it in a couple of sittings. Overall, I gave it 4 out of 5 stars. It hit the right spots that a rom-com should hit, made me smile, and was an enjoyable and light read. However, I wish that the author had gone into more depth about some of the main relationships in the book - before I get into that, though, let me explain what the book’s about.

The Night We Met focuses on the relationship between Larissa and Chris. They discuss books and movies, co-parent a lovable yet trouble-causing dog named Woofarine (yes this name made me cringe throughout the whole book), and confide in each other. The only problem? Chris isn’t Larissa’s boyfriend - that role belongs to Mike, Chris’s best friend. 

When I first read about the boyfriend’s-best-friend trope, I was immediately put off. I can’t stand sibling love triangles, and this seemed just as bad. I hate watching the relationship between two best friends or siblings deteriorate because they both fall for the same person. And I can’t stand the inner dialogue as a person grapples with their contradictory loyalty and love for their sibling/best friend and their feelings for that person’s girlfriend or boyfriend. It’s just so messy and is a sure way to rage bait me. But as I mentioned, I was kind of looking to be rage-baited, so I started reading the book. 

The beginning wasn’t as bad as I thought. Larissa and her friend Lexi meet Mike and Chris when they need a ride back home. Larissa chooses to have Mike drive her, because *shock* Chris is a bit broody and didn’t seem very excited at the thought of driving her back. A few months later, Larissa and Mike are casually dating. Larissa and Chris don’t meet again until Mike gets hungover and is unable to drive Larissa and her mother to the hospital for her mother’s surgery. Mike calls Chris and asks him to drive them instead, and hence the friendship between Larissa and Chris begins. 

I honestly loved their friendship. They have some really fun moments together, such as ordering all the different types of bread at a restaurant and rating all of them, going on a long hike and drinking grape blood water (it makes more sense when you read the book, trust), and exchanging texts about the trouble that Woofarine gets into. It’s obvious that Chris and Larissa have a deep connection, and they really understand each other at a level and Larissa and Mike don’t. It was sweet seeing the things that Chris would do to help Larissa when she needed it, and both of them seemed like genuine people. 

While we didn’t get to go super in-depth into the characters in the way that my favorite books do, the character depth was one of the better ones I’ve seen for a rom-com. Larissa is struggling to pay off the credit card debt that her dad amassed by using her card, and I enjoyed seeing her ambition and creativity as she finds new ways to earn money. I related to her feelings about work and productivity, and I admired how hard she worked and how she looked to the bright side of things. I also loved that she’s a reader - and not a typical FMC rom-com lover but a reader of old sci-fi and fantasy novels. However, we don’t get to learn much about her relationships with her mother or her best friend Lexi, and I would have liked to learn a bit more about her passions, goals (besides getting out of debt), and unique skills. Her personality mainly includes working hard and finding creative and resourceful ways to earn some extra cash to get out of her dad’s credit-card debt. 

On the other hand, we have Chris. I think Chris is a total sweetheart (besides when he falls for his best friend’s girlfriend). He’s a pharmacist, is hard working and kind, and is a natural caregiver. He treats Larissa amazingly well and always goes the extra mile for her without being asked and without taking credit. However, I feel that his character is only developed in the ways that it involves his relationship with Larissa. Throughout the book, I learn nothing about his relationship with his mother or his father, and his best friends who he says are like his brothers still feel like complete strangers. So in this way, Chris comes off as an underdeveloped character whose only personality traits are related to caring for Larissa. But I will say that, for the time that Chris is on the page, I find myself sharing his frustrations and feelings - even if I don’t fully understand or know him.

The main issues about their characters is that they didn’t have unique voices. There was nothing in Larissa’s or Chris’s narration that was specific to their personalities. I love when I can start reading a chapter and it just feels like I’m inside of the narrator’s head, and I never felt like that throughout this book. 

The whole best-friend’s-girlfriend thing was painful, as expected. While their friendship was endearing, the emotional cheating was annoying and frustrating to me. When I started this book, I hoped that Larissa would break up with her boyfriend Mike for reasons unrelated to Chris, and I’m glad that this actually occurred in the book. The deep friendship and connection between Larissa and Chris naturally evolves into a romantic one after the breakup, which was okay by me. Ignoring Larissa’s relationship with Mike, I liked the slow burn of Larissa and Chris after the breakup. However, I still can’t shake the ick of knowing that she was dating his best friend for almost a year - BARF. They struggle with the ostracization of their friends and hurting Mike’s feelings, but eventually Chris and Larissa decide that what they have is worth what they might lose (double barf). I did appreciate that both Chris and Larissa recognize that their friendship sometimes feels a bit inappropriate considering Larissa’s dating Chris’s best friend - but they don’t do anything about it (Ugh). And I always feel a bit sad watching someone lose their best friend due to a romantic relationship. However, this is to be expected with the plot, and it wasn’t as messy as some other love triangles that I’ve read (such as The Summer I Turned Pretty). 

But honestly, if you ignore how much I hate the trope of this book (which is a lot), I had two major issues with it.

The first is that we literally know nothing about Mike and his relationship with Larissa. All I know about Mike is that he is a part time personal trainer, that he wanted to play professional sports but got injured, and that his way of dealing with his depression is to binge-drink (which often results in Mike letting Larissa down). And yes, I know this book is supposed to focus on Larissa and Chris - but I feel like it’s very important that we understand the dynamic of Larissa and Mike. Larissa and Mike’s relationship is crucial to the book, as its the main conflict preventing Larissa and Chris from acting on their feelings. There isn’t a single moment in the book where Larissa and Mike are together and hanging out as a couple - any scene in which Larissa and Mike are together is rooted in Chris. For this reason, I don’t understand Mike and Larissa’s relationship at all. From what I could gather while reading, their relationship seems imbalanced. Larissa seems lukewarm towards Mike at best, and she spends most of her time thinking about Chris and then feeling guilty about thinking about her boyfriend’s best friend. Mike, on the other hand, seems totally in love with Larissa, wanting the relationship to be more serious. But he hardly seems to know her at all, which makes it hard to believe that he’s so in love with Larissa. The feelings that he does have for Larissa seem to be artificial and not genuine, while Larissa seems disengaged from their relationship in general. I wanted there to be more of a balance between Chris’s and Mike’s relationships with Larissa so that we could really understand why Larissa spent ten months with Mike and how attached to Larissa Mike really was. I wanted to better understand their relationship to see what makes her choose Chris over Mike in a more balanced way, yet Abby Jimenez heavily tips the scales to favor Chris. Mike has very few redeeming qualities and no depth in this book, and I really want to get to understand him. It felt frustrating to me that I couldn’t. 

And secondly - the group of best friends that are more like brothers is hardly discussed. The whole point of making a series where each book features a different best friend as the protagonist is that I actually get to know the different best friends and spend time enveloped in their friend group dynamics. In The Night We Met, I think there are a total of about three scenes where all of the friends are together. And these scenes are focused more on Larissa and Chris rather than the friend group of Xavier, Chris, Mike, and Jesse. Chris is supposed to feel guilty for falling for the girl that his best friend is in love with, but I hardly see a brotherly interaction between Chris and Mike at all, except when one suddenly appears out of nowhere at the very end. I can’t count the amount of times that Chris tells himself that Mike is his best friend because it happens so often. I also can’t count the amount of times where Chris and Mike actually acted like best friends because this never happens. They mainly interact when talking about Larissa, and when Chris is telling Mike that he needs to work on some of his issues regarding his medications and mental health. That’s it. It feels almost like Chris is more of Mike’s caretaker than his best friend. We never see Mike and Chris just have fun together or talk to each other. They have no inside jokes, don’t discuss memories, and make no remarks hinting at how well they know each other. So I didn’t fully buy it when Chris spends so much time lamenting about how much his friendship with Mike means to him and how he hates hurting Mike. This is especially problematic because this is the main roadblock to Larissa and Chris finally getting together. 

I’ve seen that Abby Jimenez is set to release a third book in this series next spring - I’m hoping it’ll be a Mike redemption arc. Mike’s character lacked development in this book, but its obvious that he has serious issues and struggles that he doesn’t tell Larissa about and that Abby Jimenez never expands upon. I sympathize with him, and his last conversation with Chris in The Night We Met literally made me tear up. I’m hoping to see him improving and finding genuine love in her next book!

Since I devoured The Night We Met in like a day and a half, I decided to read the first book in the series, Say You’ll Remember Me. This book focuses on Xavier, another member of Chris and Mike’s friend group.

I really liked the premise of Say You’ll Remember Me, as it shows a couple struggling with the age-old question of what do you do when you meet the absolute right person at the wrong time.

Xavier is a veterinarian who just opened up his own clinic in Minnesota. Like a typical MMC, he’s quiet and closed off yet is a secret softie. He’s having a bad day when Samatha first walks into his clinic with an injured kitten she rescued. After an unsuccessful initial interaction that may or may not have ended in an argument, they eventually meet again a week or so later when Samantha returns with her kitten. Xavier asks her out and she immediately agrees, and they proceed to have the best date of their lives. It’s only after the ending of this unforgettable night that Samantha tells Xavier that she’s moving across the country to California - tomorrow. The rest of the book follows the characters as they contemplate doing long distance, weighing their feelings for each other with the horrendous logistics of actually seeing each other face to face. 

Firstly, let’s talk about the things I enjoyed about this book.

I’m not gonna lie - this book had me laughing out loud at multiple points as I was reading. Xavier and Samantha get into some hilarious situations that manage to feel rom-com-esque without being cliché and overdone. I loved their interactions and their conversations together - both characters have a deep connection and friendship that allows them to both laugh and joke easily while also having deeper conversations about themselves, their pasts, and their relationship. I also really enjoyed the scenes that take place in southern California. As a SoCal native who lived an hour and a half outside of LA until I was thirteen years old, Abby Jimenez did a fantastic job of making SoCal feel like SoCal. 

I really loved contemplating some of the themes in this book. Samantha and Xavier have some deep conversations about loving the mundane and being able to spend time with the person you’re dating. At one point, Xavier makes a remark about how love isn’t about the big moments - the birthdays, the vacations, the anniversaries or celebration - it’s all about the mundane. The little everyday moments that make up the fabric of our lives. These moments aren’t the ones you remember explicitly forever - but you remember how you felt at that point in time and that you spent time with the person that you loved. This really resonated with me, and it made me want to make more of an effort to find joy in the little things. I often feel like I’m so busy with school and research and other commitments that I mark my time by assignments, tests, and due dates - thinking that once I get all my work out of the way I’ll finally have time to enjoy myself and spend time with those I care about. But there’s always another assignment, or another test, and the next thing I know time has flown by and I haven’t taken the time to appreciate the little things. So this book made me want to make sure I appreciate those little things - because those are the moments that make up our lives. 

The book also discusses love and relationships in the context of long distance. Both Samantha and Xavier explicitly say that they want to date someone who is a “witness to [their] life”. They want someone who can witness the ebbs and flows of the seasons with them, a person to share countless inside jokes with, and to date someone that partakes in everyday life with them. I thought that this was an interesting perspective on relationships, and I understand the importance of sharing the little moments with people and growing with someone close by. However, this brings me to one of my main issues with this book.

Both Samantha and Xavier repeat multiple times that they don’t want to be in a long distance relationship, due to the reasons I just mentioned before. They want to have someone to experience the mundane with, which just isn’t possible when the person they’re dating lives across the country. Both characters remark that their lives feel “grey” without the other one there , as Xavier works himself to the ground and Samantha deals with family commitments. However, they still decide to enter a long distance relationship! There’s the whole push-and-pull thing, where they both want to be with each other so badly while also feel that they can’t act on their feelings because it’ll only lead to long distance misery. Either Samantha or Xavier will be thinking about how much they want their partner to experience the mundane with them, or how much of a toll the long-distance travelling is doing to them - and then suddenly they finally meet again and the colors are suddenly bright and they don’t care about the long distance issues anymore. Ugh. I can tell that both of these characters hate being in a long distance relationship - Xavier literally makes himself sick working so much to earn enough money to fly to CA - and its frustrating to me watching them lose themselves for months at a time just to get a few days together. I mean, do whatever makes you happy, I guess, but I don’t think these characters are happy. Watching them choose to be miserable apart just to be happy together for like 5% of the time they spend apart just isn’t worth it in my opinion. Not to say that I don’t think that long distance relationships are a bad idea - I know that they can work out well - but I am saying that I don’t think it was good for either of these characters. 

The other main issue I had with this book was that it felt like insta-love. I understand that Abby Jimenez wanted the book to focus on a couple where everything is right except for the logistics, but in order to do that in a reasonable amount of pages, she had to put Xavier and Samantha together really quickly. I don’t believe that two people can go from being complete strangers to falling in love so fast. I would have loved to watch their relationship have more of a slow burn, but I guess that the nature of the book makes this difficult for the author to pull off. Personally, I don’t believe in love at first sight. I think it takes a while for people to fall in love with each other, so I have a hard time buying it as Samantha and Xavier think all of these lovey-dovey things about each other when they’ve barely spent any time together. Also, since the main conflict of the book is in regards to the long distance aspect of the relationship, Samantha and Xavier have no other issues - they never really fight, and they hardly disagree or have conflict. This makes them seem almost a bit “too-perfect” in my eyes. And I think that Abby Jimenez could have caused more disagreements within their relationship while still focusing on the long-distance aspect, so I was kind of sad that we never got to see how Samantha and Xavier overcome challenges together. Putting this aside, though, they were a cute couple and I think that they balanced each other well.

Another issue that I had with the book was Xavier’s character development. He literally has 3 main personality traits - being in love with Samantha, having both daddy and mommy issues, and working a lot. That’s it. He’s a typical grumpy MMC in the way that he doesn’t smile often, “but when he does, he lights up the room” (barf). We don’t get any depth to his character, his passions or interests, or patterns of thinking. I would have liked to learn more about him through his interactions with his friends, but like the other book in the series, there are hardly any friendship moments between Xavier, Chris, Mike, and Jesse. The book is so focused on Xavier and Samantha that Xavier’s other relationships aren’t discussed at all.

On the other hand, I’d argue that Samantha’s character was more developed. This is mostly done through her interactions with her family. Samantha’s mother has dementia, which is the reason why Samantha moves back to CA. As she works with her older sister, younger brother, grandmother, and father to help care for her mother, you get to learn a lot about her family and her relationships with her family members. Since Samantha’s so busy helping with her mother and siblings, Xavier is almost always the one to come and fly to her, which makes their relationship seem a bit unbalanced in my opinion. We see Xavier sacrifice so much for Samantha (working himself to the bone, giving up work opportunities, missing time with friends to get extra hours in) while Samantha doesn’t put in that same amount of sacrifice. I guess it is harder for her to do so, but it still feels uneven. 

But going back to the character development - I happened to really enjoy Samantha’s narration style. She’s quite funny and I like hearing her outlook on life. Watching her struggle with her mother’s dementia was emotional, and it made me question how I would act if I were in a similar situation as her. I really sympathized for all she and her family was going through. And speaking of Samantha’s family - I absolutely LOVED Tristan’s character. He’s so entertaining and gives off the best youngest sibling vibes. I have the feeling that he’s very sensitive yet tries to keep a tough skin, which makes me more interested in getting to know him. I’d love to have a book about Tristan because I feel like he has so many interesting stories and thoughts. 

Overall? I gave these books a four out of five stars. They wer really addicting (I finished the two of them within three days) and they managed to feel more developed and complex than many other rom-coms out there. They struck the right balance between being a super cutesy and cliche rom-com that feels like something middle schoolers would like and being the popular half-smut YA trashy romance. I enjoyed Abby Jimenez’s writing style, and I can tell that she puts a lot of time and effort into making her books feel authentic. Will I remember everything about these books in two months? Probably not. But I really enjoyed reading them, and I didn’t feel like reading them was a waste of time either. I’d recommend both books to any friends who enjoyed rom-coms and romance books, and I’m definitely coming back for the continuation of the series.