As You Walk On By might be one of my favourite books of the year

 

I’ll say that I am straight up a Julian Winters fan, so I knew this book was coming out since it was announced. I don’t have a cute little discovery story for this one; I follow Julian Winters on both Twitter and Instagram and that’s how I found out about it.

The blurb says that seventeen-year-old Theo Wright has it all figured out. His plan (well, more like his dad’s plan) is a foolproof strategy that involves excelling at his magnet school, getting scouted by college recruiters, and going to Duke on athletic scholarship. But for now, all Theo wants is a perfect prom night. After his best friend Jay dares him to prompose to his crush at Chloe Campbell’s party, Theo’s ready to throw caution to the wind and take his chances. But when his promposal goes epically wrong, Theo seeks refuge in an empty bedroom while the party rages on downstairs. Having an existential crisis about who he really is wasn’t on tonight’s agenda. Though, as the night goes on, Theo finds he’s not alone as he thinks when, one by one, new classmates join him to avoid who they’re supposed to be outside the bedroom door. Among them, a familiar acquaintance, a quiet outsider, an old friend, and a new flame…

So, for some reason, I straight up didn’t even look up what this book was about before I bought it; I went in totally blind. But from reading the blurb, I was going into it thinking that the majority of the book was going to be told from the setting of that one bedroom, and I thought that could have been a really interesting concept. I did sound like Theo was going to hiding in that bedroom, and that a bunch of different people would be coming and going, so that’s what I expected going into it.

Chapter one sees Theo in school with his friends, Jay and Darren, on a thing they call a “dare day” where one Friday a month during lunch they dare each other to do stuff. They have rules like nothing illegal, nothing that will cause bodily harm, only get gauche laughs and the occasional detention. Then on this dare day, Jay dares Theo to ask Christian Harris (his crush) to prom. He has to do it by the end of lunch, but before he gets the chance he crashes into this other kid with a bunch of anime stuff on their bag, so he gets given another chance. Chapter two lets us see the party they’re going to, and then a bunch of acquaintances pass by. I think I would have under other circumstances said that not much happens in this chapter. Given the impression I was under of how this book was going to be, though, I was perfectly fine with it as, in my mind, it made sense. Also, Theo’s track and field coach likes Theo’s dad, but nothing really comes of it. I’ve not mentioned it yet, but Theo is very much a not rich kid at a school full of affluent children vibes. As they head to the party Theo also mentions to the reader that it’s almost like there’s comfort level with his (Theo’s) sexuality that Jay hasn’t reached yet. To me, that meant one of two things: Jay either had a problem with, or was into, Theo. It had to be one of those two.

So the failed promposal: Did not happen in the way I thought it did. I’m not going to spoil anything, but it also didn’t happen as early as I thought it would either. These lines are a really simple way of saying that despite how chilled out this book felt, if you ignore the majority of it was set at a house party, it kept surprising me. Things just didn’t happen in the ways that I thought they would. But yeah, for the promposal, I did have very different expectations for what it was going to be for what it actually was. When it actually happened, it was a lot less dramatic or epic than I was expecting. It sort of just happened and then that was it. Also, since this is as close as I’m coming to criticisms, I’ll just tag on the fact there were a couple of moments that were very sickly sweet to the point I could definitely see someone thinking they were too sickly sweet. And that’s all I’ve got in the way of criticism for this book.

There was this one little bit that I loved, and it was just a little bit. So, Theo is in the bedroom with two other people. The two other people are enthusiastically talking about anime, and while Theo does like anime, he’s not as big into it as the other two. We then get a little bit about when he attended an anime club meeting where, again, everyone just seemed more into it than him, he then mentions that he felt like he had no right to call anime “his thing” because he didn’t have the vocabulary to discuss it like the others did. I loved reading that, because I feel that in fandom so often. For me it’s mostly in music, K-Pop especially. I’ll see people on TikTok making content about all the concerts they manage to go to, and they will often go to multiple dates for these artists and groups. To get specific, I’ve seen people doing this with Stray Kids and P1Harmony as of me writing this post. But then I’m just there at home watching their content, without the means or ability to go to a single concert date. It’s the case of even though I don’t have the ability to see these groups, it doesn’t make me any less of a fan than these people who are able to go to multiple tour dates, get dressed up and make viral TikTok content. I’m still allowed to call it my thing, even if these other people have more opportunities and all I can do is stream the music and watch the online content.

This is probably my favourite book that Julian Winters has put out. This might be the one that has also made me feel the most. Like, I wanted good for all the characters in the bedroom. Side point, I assumed that they’d all sort of come and go one at a time, and they don’t. And saying that, I think the book works better the way it is. But to get back to the book itself, even though I already knew that Julian Winters does introspection well, I feel like this story was an extra push. Normally when the main character does something bad, you’re still on their side, since they’re the narrator. In this book, there’s something fairly major that Theo does where he’s in the wrong, and I was fully like, “Damn, I’m not actually on his side”, and the fact that a chunk of the book is in this secluded setting, a lot of the emotions felt heightened, almost as if I was in the bedroom along with the characters, and I wanted to know what Theo was going to do.

I am, however, so glad that Theo got the crap that he got. I think this might be one of the first books I’ve read where the realisations or conflict in a “things just happen” sort of book have been so hard. I don’t know how to explain it other than sometimes conflict doesn’t always feel like it matters, but in this book, I was like, “Oh, wait… Theo might have actually genuinely ruined things”, because he sort of kept going in cycles. Normally, I will say that those kinds of cycles would have annoyed me, but in this book it didn’t, because I understood why Theo was in the cycle in the first place and why he was the way he was. So, it was irritating, because you want Theo to be good, but you also knew that he couldn’t just be at the point he was in his life.

To keep on the setting a little longer, when I thought the whole book would take place in the bedroom, it didn’t. A good chunk did, but not as much as I thought, and to be honest, I’m glad it didn’t, because I feel like there would have only been so much that could have happened if it had. I also realise that I’ve not talked about any characters besides Theo so far. So there is Darren and Jay, Theo’s friends, you learn more about them when Theo is outside the bedroom and then there’s a group within the bedroom: Luca, River, Makayla and Aleah. You get bits of the group prior to being in the bedroom, but it’s also the case of, even though Theo really only starts to talk to or build/rebuild relationships with them in the bedroom and because they’re spending so much time in forced proximity, all they can do is either sit in silence or learn stuff about each other. It ended up being for as much as I wanted to learn about everyone, there was only so much that could be learned in one night, and I really appreciated that the point came up where Theo admits that he didn’t actually know all that much about the group in the bedroom, despite the bonding they were doing. It was like no matter what happened inside of the room, it was what happened outside the room that solidified everyone’s feelings.

And that is all I have about this book. I really enjoyed it! To reiterate, it is by far my favourite of Julian Winters’ books that have been released by far. I don’t know what it was about this book, but something just hit different for me and at this point, it’s 100% going to be on my favourite books of the year.

Okay, bye!