Always One More Time

Always One More Time is a YA romance built almost entirely out of already exhausted machinery: a sick-girl countdown, a missed-connection quest, a grumpy British boy, a sunny American girl, a tragic dead mother, an abandoned son, a cute dog, a spreadsheet, a rom-com chase, a hospital scare, a temporary separation, and a final reunion engineered so neatly that it barely feels human. The book wants to be about timing, love, grief, risk, art, and the courage to be vulnerable. Mostly, it is about forcing every scene to underline the word “heart” until the metaphor gives up.

The opening announces the manipulation immediately. Tallie Henderson tells us that “a minute from now my heart will stop beating,” and that before it happens she will have met and lost the love of her life. This is the kind of melodramatic fake-out that looks urgent but is actually cheap. The book starts by promising death or tragedy, then spends the rest of the story walking the reader toward a surgery scare that is never really allowed to become dangerous. It is not suspense so much as emotional bait.

Forty-nine days earlier, Tallie is at her final pediatric cardiology appointment with her father, Dwight. She has a congenital heart defect: her aortic valve is missing one leaflet. This has always been monitored, but now Dr. Gayle tells them her stenosis has worsened and surgery is likely. The twist is obvious and heavily loaded: Tallie’s mother died from the same kind of heart surgery two hours after giving birth to her. Dwight has therefore spent Tallie’s whole life worrying, hovering, and loving her through fear. The book returns to this so often that grief stops feeling lived-in and starts feeling like a plot button.