If You Change Your Mind, by Robby Weber

[Ulysses]

If You Change Your Mind
By Robby Weber
Published by Inkyard, 2022
Five stars

Robby Weber’s gentle, textured story of Harry Kensington, a Florida high-schooler with a head full of dreams, is a romantic comedy, but also rather more than a romantic comedy. It embraces wholeheartedly the idea of romantic love, while offering a surprisingly pointed look at the sharp-edged realities beneath the popular mythology that has clouded rational thought for at least two centuries now (I’m talking about Jane Austen).

While the central focus is teenage romance and all its fraught-ness, there is adult love, too, which anchors the narrative and provides a double-edged reality check—Harry’s twice-divorced mother, and Logan’s happily married aunt and uncle. The very idea of “happily ever after” starting in high school is questioned, which I found a great comfort.

Harry is an appealing, intelligent teenager. He loves his mother and his two sisters, who live in affectionate chaos in a Florida shore town as his mother builds a successful business. Harry has dreams of becoming a screenwriter in Hollywood, and has pinned his dreams on a competition promising a star recommendation to University of Southern California, (USC, known semi-fondly as the University of Spoiled Children). I bring that up because Harry is a spoiled child—not in a negative way, but in that he lives a pretty charmed life. Although it is never stated bluntly, he is clearly good-looking as well as smart. But also goofy, and of course gay, which makes him special to me.

The complicated back story is heartbreak at the hands of Harry’s ex, Grant Kennedy, who disappeared to UCLA without so much as a fare-thee-well. That complication is compounded by the appearance of a new face, Logan Waters, in town for the summer visiting his aunt and uncle. Logan sparks new romantic dreams in Harry, who struggles to focus on the screenwriting competition in order to fulfill his career-based romantic dreams.

Oddly enough, there are no real bad guys in this story, and one of the book’s charms is that Weber makes sure we understand that. These are teenagers. They do stupid things and people get hurt. As Logan even says outright at one point (I paraphrase): we’re kids, we’re just figuring things out. Love is a complicated and confusing emotion—including love of family and friends. Weber handles it all in a light rom-com vein, without shying away from painful introspection.

To my horror, I realized that I am probably older than Harry’s very cool grandmother, and that his mother could be my daughter. But I am not relegated to that spot in this book’s emotional offering, because I remember vividly what it was to be a seventeen-year-old gay teenager, in a very different world than the one Harry is lucky enough to inhabit. The author very neatly acknowledges the reality of the 21st century, but also offers emotional truths that struck me as universally applicable, even going back two generations.

There is no pat happy ending offered up here. Instead, what we get are possibilities and potential. There really is no happier ending for teenagers than this, and it warmed my heart to read it.