Always Forever Maybe

Overview

Anica Mrose Rissi's debut novel follows Betts, a teenager who falls hard and fast for Aiden after a chance meeting at the candy shop where she works. The attraction is immediate and intoxicating, and Betts quickly convinces herself that what they have is not a passing crush but something permanent and preordained.

As the relationship intensifies, Betts begins keeping secrets from Jo, her lifelong best friend and the one person who has always known everything about her. Jo is uneasy about Aiden from the start, seeing traits in him that Betts refuses to name: a need to control, a jealousy dressed up as devotion, a pattern of pulling Betts away from the people who love her.

The novel traces the widening gap between the two girls as Betts rationalizes Aiden's behavior and Jo watches, increasingly alarmed, from the outside. What unfolds is less a conventional romance than a portrait of how a first love can reshape a person's sense of judgment, loyalty, and self.

A Closer Look at the Story

Rissi's book sits within a lineage of YA novels that use the intensity of adolescent romance to examine something darker underneath it. Comparisons to writers like Sarah Dessen and Sara Zarr point to its interest in emotional interiority over plot mechanics: the story lives in Betts's internal justifications, her growing distance from Jo, and the small accommodations she makes that accumulate into something harder to escape.

What distinguishes the novel is its refusal to announce its own argument. Betts narrates her own experience as a love story even as the details she shares suggest otherwise, leaving readers to notice the dissonance between what she tells herself and what the reader can see. This narrative strategy has made the book useful in conversations about teen dating and coercive control, since it models the subjectivity of someone inside an unhealthy dynamic rather than presenting a clear-cut cautionary tale from a safe distance.

The friendship between Betts and Jo functions as the novel's moral center. Jo's discomfort with Aiden, and Betts's resistance to hearing it, dramatize a tension familiar to many teenagers: the difficulty of trusting a friend's outside perspective over the certainty of one's own feelings.

Why Always Forever Maybe Has Been Challenged

The relationship at the center of the book is the source of most scrutiny. Aiden's possessiveness and need for control are presented through Betts's adoring lens, meaning readers spend much of the novel inside a perspective that minimizes or excuses behavior that the text itself, through Jo, identifies as troubling. Some objectors argue that this closeness to Betts's point of view risks romanticizing the relationship for younger or less critical readers, even though the narrative distance ultimately invites scrutiny of Aiden's conduct rather than endorsement of it.

Concerns have also centered on the book's candid treatment of teenage sexuality and emotional intensity, subject matter that some reviewers consider inappropriate for the age range the novel targets. Others have questioned whether a story about manipulation and control, told so convincingly from inside the relationship, does enough to signal to teen readers that what they are witnessing is a warning rather than a model. The book has been the subject of 1 challenge tracked in this catalog, reflecting a single community's concern rather than a widespread pattern of objection.