Never always sometimes

Overview

Dave and Julia have grown up next door to each other, close enough that they've built a running inventory of everything they find embarrassing about the way high school is supposed to work. Out of that shared exasperation comes their "Never List"—a set of vows against the clichés they've watched classmates fall into year after year, from claiming a permanent lunch table to angling for a prom crown.

The novel follows the two of them into senior year as their list is tested by circumstance. Plans made with teenage certainty rarely survive contact with an actual school year, and the humor of the book comes from watching two self-aware kids try to out-maneuver the very conventions they've sworn off.

What emerges is less a satire of high school than an affectionate, occasionally wistful account of it—one that takes its characters' resistance seriously even as it lets them discover how hard that resistance is to sustain.

Charting Your Own Script

Underneath its comic premise, the book is interested in a genuinely tricky question: whether rejecting a cliché is actually different from performing one, or just a more self-conscious version of the same need to belong. Dave and Julia's list gives them a sense of control over an experience—adolescence—that is notoriously resistant to control, and the story gets its tension from watching that control slip.

The book sits comfortably within Adi Alsaid's broader interest in teenagers whose lives are shaped by chance encounters and the gap between the future they plan and the one they actually get. As in his other work, the pleasure here is less in plot mechanics than in close, sympathetic attention to how young people narrate their own lives to themselves—and what happens when that narration stops matching reality.

Why Never Always Sometimes Has Been Challenged

Much of the scrutiny directed at the novel tracks back to its unvarnished depiction of senior-year social life: teenagers drinking at parties, navigating physical and romantic relationships, and using language that mirrors how real high schoolers talk rather than how adults might prefer they talk on the page. For readers who favor more sanitized portrayals of adolescence, that realism itself reads as the problem, regardless of the moral arc surrounding it.

A quieter strand of objection concerns the book's premise on its own terms—a pair of students openly rejecting school-sanctioned milestones like prom court and institutional popularity contests can be read by some as modeling disrespect for traditions that schools and communities invest with meaning. The catalog records this title as challenged in 2 states and 3 districts, reflecting both of these threads: concern over mature content and discomfort with its skeptical take on conventional teenage achievement.