Genre 📚: YA Contemporary, Fantasy, Queer Lit, Romance
Tropes 💁♀️: Fated love, Forbidden love, Past lives
Rep ✔️: Queer main characters, POC side characters
CW ⚠️: Homophobia, bullying, off-page hazing
Rating ⭐️: 4.5/5
Wow, okay. I, um, didn’t ask to be hurt like this… Don’t Let Me Go explores a M/M romance that dates back centuries, all the way to freaking 79 AD. The main characters Riley and Jackson have eerily vivid dreams of these past lives, where they are always in love — and they always die young. So yeah. Be ready for this book to hurt you.
The dreams start with Riley, when he first meets Jackson and promptly faints (as his friends say, he literally swooned into Jackson’s arms, heh). Riley, of course, assumes that they’re just dreams, but he can’t shake how familiar this new guy is. He’s hesitant in getting to know him, but they gradually open up to each other and become fast friends. Then, as romantic feelings arise, Jackson starts getting the dreams. The boys realize that these are real memories, and they seem to be some kind of warning.
The book is mostly about present-day Riley and Jackson, but we also get to see their past stories in the dream scenes, which I thought was so cool. The characters are incredibly sweet in each of these stories, and they truly feel like the same couple all the way through. And though the book is like 400 pages, I was never bored — I was flipping pages like crazy. That said, the abrupt ending did take me aback and made me wish we got even more pages. My emotions still don’t know what to do with themselves. 😢
**Much thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Don’t Let Me Go will be released on May 20, 2025.
Sara Bechtol 