What To Say Next by Julie Buxbaum

Publisher: Delacorte Press, Random House
On Sale Date: July 11th 2017
Pages: 292
Age Range: Young Adult

David Drucker is a teen who spends most of his lunch breaks at Mapleview High alone. Being social is not his best talent, as he is dealing with Asperger Syndrome. But then one day Kit Lowell joins him at his empty table.
It was just a few months ago that Kit lost her beloved dad in a car crash. After that, she finds it difficult to be with her old friends Annie and Violet, as they don't quite understand the mourning she is going through. She doesn't even understand it herself.

Slowly, Kit breaks the shell that David has build around him and they become friends. Kit totally loves that David just say what he thinks, even all the random facts he seems to know. David learns more about the accident of Kit's father, and together they try to figure out what happened.

What Kit doesn't know is that David falls in love with her, while slowly on she starts to love him too.

But then someone posts David personal diary with notes in it about everyone in his classes and what he thinks of them, and he is the target of everyone pointing a blaming finger and him and he even receives serious threats.
And on top of that they find out some very revealing thinks about Kit's father's accident, while she is dealing with the fact that her mother has hidden quite some secrets from her..

What To Say Next is the new book by Julie Buxbaum that was high on my want-to-read list after I have read and reviewed her previous book Tell Me Three Things. Was it just as fantastic? Not really.
First of all, I found the pace of the story slow. Certainly in the beginning it was very focused on David's trouble with socializing. That really slowed things down. Secondly, the friendship between David and Kit took quite some time to start up, and in the meantime there wasn't anything happening of impact in the story. Ofcourse a friendship needs time to build up, but you have to keep your readers interested in some way. 

The other thing that I found a bit odd that in the end Kit finds out that she was actually in the car as a passenger when her dad's car crashed. When that was revealed I thought; Huh?? It really set you on the wrong foot as a reader, maybe that was the intention of the author, but if found it confusing as untill the moment that is revealed Kit wants David to help her find to find out what happened. How could she not know then that she was in the car herself? Traumatic memory loss is an option, but that isn't mentioned in the story.

So overall I had very mixed feelings about this book, I was hoping it was just a good and had a entertaining storyline like the previous book, but it didn't met my expectations.