Again Again

Overview

Again Again centers on Adelaide Buchwald, a teenager still reeling from a frightening emergency involving her younger brother and the unraveling of her parents' marriage. Set adrift by both, she spends a summer testing out different versions of herself, particularly in matters of romance, as the narrative branches again and again to imagine how a single encounter might unfold in more than one way.

Rather than following one straight line from beginning to end, the novel circles back on its own scenes, replaying moments with small variations to ask what might have happened if Adelaide had said something differently, trusted someone sooner, or let herself be more honest. The structure mirrors her interior state: someone trying to make sense of a chaotic year by turning it over from multiple angles.

What emerges is less a conventional romance than a study of a young woman reckoning with guilt, family strain, and the strange, overblown certainty with which teenagers sometimes narrate their own lives. E. Lockhart, known for narrative misdirection in earlier novels, uses the same instinct here toward introspective rather than mysterious ends.

Adelaide's Many Summers

The novel's use of branching, hypothetical timelines places it in conversation with a wider trend of young adult fiction experimenting with nonlinear or multiple-outcome structures, using form to externalize a character's indecision rather than simply to surprise the reader. Here, the device serves a specific emotional purpose: Adelaide's compulsive replaying of romantic possibility becomes a way of avoiding, and eventually approaching, the more painful facts of her brother's addiction and her parents' separation.

Coming after the propulsive plotting of Lockhart's earlier bestsellers, this book is a quieter, more meditative turn, trading twist endings for a sustained interest in how people rationalize themselves through crisis. Its central tension is not whether Adelaide will get the boy, but whether she can stop narrating her life as a story happening to her and start recognizing her own choices within it.

Why Again Again Has Been Challenged

Much of the disagreement over Again Again centers on where, and for whom, a book about a teenager's sexual and romantic experimentation belongs on school shelves, rather than on the literary merit of its structure. Reviewers who have flagged the book point to its frank treatment of teenage sexuality, including scenes depicting physical intimacy, alongside depictions of underage drinking and drug use tied to the brother's addiction storyline. Some objections also cite the book's casual, sometimes irreverent tone toward sex as poorly suited to younger readers, even within a high school collection. Within this catalog, the book has been the subject of challenge activity in 1 state and 1 school district, reflecting a narrower but still notable current of concern about its suitability for adolescent readers.