Something Certain, Maybe: Review & Q&A with Sara Barnard [Blog Tour]

Genre: YA Contemporary, LGBTQ+
Date Published: July 7, 2022
Rating: ★★★★★

A powerful novel about first love, friendships and embracing the uncertainty of an unknowable future, from Sara Barnard, winner of the YA Book Prize.

Rosie is ready for her life to begin, because nothing says new life like going to university. After years of waiting and working hard, she’s finally on the road that will secure her future.

Except university turns out to be not what she hoped or imagined, and although she’s not exactly unhappy – really! – she might be a little bit worried that she doesn’t really like her course much. Or her flatmates. Or really… anything? But it’s normal to be homesick (right?) and everything will have settled in a month or two, and it’s totally fine that her friends seem so much happier than she is, and that the doctors don’t seem to know what’s wrong with her mother.

But then she meets Jade, and everything starts to look a little brighter. At least, it does if she’s only looking at Jade. But is first love enough when everything else is falling apart?

Find out more or buy the book:

Something Certain, Maybe: My Thoughts

I really enjoyed Beautiful Broken Things and Fierce Fragile Hearts, which tell the stories of Caddy and Suze. They both have great stories of fitting in, the characters discovering who they really are, and finding what makes them happy. This time, Something Certain, Maybe focuses on Rosie, the best friend of Caddy and Suze, as she deals with the struggles of going to university as well as unexpected problems back home.

There are two things I love in a book: LGBTQ+ characters, and good, solid friendships. Something Certain, Maybe has both of these, and so much more! I loved that we got to learn more about Rosie, who has been one of the most intriguing characters. In the first two first we don’t find out a great deal about her and her home life, so it was great to discover more about her and see how she deals with being away from her friends for the first time when she goes to uni.

The University Experience

Speaking of university, I think that’s the reason this book resonated with me so much. Rosie’s experience of going to uni felt so much like my own in many ways. The worry of being in a completely new place, having to make new friends (but struggling to do so because everyone feels so different to you), and wondering whether you’ve picked the right course – these are all things I struggled with in my first year, too. Sometimes it felt like I was reading about my own experience, so I could feel so much of how Rosie felt.

Often, YA books can sugarcoat things and make them seem like everything is perfect or that it will all work out exactly the way you’d hoped. So when this book turned out to be a realistic view of how tough the university experience can be, it was refreshing to read. University is a huge (and expensive) route, and Rosie’s story shows that it’s not for everyone, and that’s okay! In my case, my experience got a lot better and I ended up being glad I stayed, but that’s not the case for everyone – and it’s great to have perspectives like this that show there are other options.

Important Friendships & a Blossoming LGBTQ+ Relationship

Just like the first two books, the friendship between the trio – Rosie, Caddy, and Suze – stays as strong as ever, despite being tested as the three of them go their separate ways. I also really love that this book introduces an LGBTQ+ relationship when Rosie meets Jade, a person who ultimately helps her realise that she doesn’t have to put herself through something she hates. Rosie comes to terms with being bisexual (more bisexual characters in books, please!!) and her blossoming relationship with Jade is a lovely, positive focus for the book. I loved seeing Jade help Rosie through her mental health struggles and her worries about whether she was making the right choices, while being the right amount of blunt and to-the-point that matched Rosie’s dynamic really well. They’re perfect for each other!

As usual, Sara’s easy writing style meant that I flew through this book (and the others, which I reread in the days previous to reading this one) – I read this in one day, which doesn’t happen very often! I’m hugely inspired by Sara’s writing, especially in terms of the strong friendships being a central theme, and it made it even more exciting to read because I kept thinking, “this is the kind of book I want to write.”

Final Notes

I’d recommend any teens to read this trilogy of books. I’d especially recommend Something Certain, Maybe to anyone who is struggling with university themselves, or just wants to see an alternative perspective that shows that sometimes, some things aren’t for everyone – and so long as you keep your friends close, everything will be okay.

Q&A with Sara Barnard

When you wrote Beautiful Broken Things, did you know you were going to write two more books focusing on Suze and Rosie?

Not at all – that was just a dream! I think the trilogy would have been very different it had been planned from the beginning, which is why I’m glad it wasn’t! The books I imagined I would write as follow-ups were very different from what FFH and SCM became. The process was a bit messy and chaotic, but I think that’s made the books all the more authentic. 

In Something Certain, Maybe, we see Rosie and Caddy go off to university for the first time. How much of their university experiences were inspired by your own?

Caddy’s experience is much closer to how mine was – I was a shy kid who went to university and felt like I’d found myself and the friends I’d always wanted. I had a brilliant first year, but those friendships didn’t last. I think there’s probably a lesson there; something I’d say to Rosie if I could is that making a lot of friends and having a good time in your first year isn’t necessarily a sign of anything lifelong. It really is all so temporary. 

A lot of people loved Rosie in Beautiful Broken Things. How did you make sure Rosie in Something Certain, Maybe stayed true to her character in the first book, and were you excited to expand on her character? (And the same with Suze in Fierce Fragile Hearts!)

I was! Rosie was probably the character whose story got edited down the most in both BBT and FFH, simply because it wasn’t as important to the central narrative in each book. It was exciting to be able to put a lot more of that on the page, and for readers to see more of her life, especially with her mum. I think for me I didn’t have to worry so much about how to stay true to her character, because I knew her so well, so she was already just there, fully formed and ready to go. (And that goes double for Suze!) The hardest part about writing Rosie was that she had a very tough act to follow, because Suze is such a vibrant character, and Caddy had been the first voice in their story. 

I’m hugely inspired by your writing! Who has inspired you most throughout your writing career, and have you ever read a book that made you think, “this is the kind of book I want to write!”?

Thank you! That’s so lovely to hear. My biggest inspirations in that sense are people like Jacqueline Wilson and Malorie Blackman – writers I grew up reading. I wanted to write books that would be a part of people’s adolescence the way their books were for me. American YA writers like Sarah Dessen and Deb Caletti were also big inspirations in terms of the kind of contemporary YA I wanted to write. 

My favourite thing about your books (and one of the things I’m most inspired by) is your focus on friendships. How important are the friendships in your own life, and what made you decide that that should be a focus in your books?

To be honest, it was never really a decision that I made – it just happened! The friend characters never felt like they should be lesser to anyone else in the book. In my own life, friendships are of course incredibly important, though something I’ve found is that long-term friendship through adulthood is a different thing to the kind of friendship you have in your teens. You come to learn and appreciate that often close friendships have stages, and don’t always last longer than a few years, but that that doesn’t diminish their value or importance. That took a while to learn. 

Out of Caddy, Rosie, and Suze, who do you think you would have got on with best when you were their age? Which one of them are you most like?

Probably Caddy, to be honest! Though I think one of the joys of Suze is that she’d get along with pretty much anyone, because she lacks Caddy’s anxiety and Rosie’s prickliness. I would have found her very intimidating as a teenager, though!

What’s next for you? Do you think you’ll return to the lives of Caddy, Suze and Rosie at some point, or do you feel like their stories are complete for now?

Much as I’d love to keep writing them forever, I do think their story is complete now, at least for them at this stage of their lives. Never say never, but there isn’t anything planned for the future. My next book will be out next year and it’s called Where the Light Goes. I’m incredibly excited about it – I can’t wait for it to be out in the world.

Follow the Blog Tour!

I’m very excited to be kicking off the blog tour for this book! If you want to follow along with the rest of the tour, here are the other blogs that will be taking part: