Summary

Haley Jakobson’s debut 2023 novel follows Sav as she navigates friendships, crushes, and schoolwork in her second year of college. After coming out as bisexual and finding a close-knit group of friends on campus, Sav is finally figuring out who she wants to be. Until her childhood friend Izzie announces she is getting married, and Sav is thrust back into her old friendship and old life, with previously buried feelings rising to the surface.

Review

(Trigger warning: sexual assault)

Old Enough is such a bittersweet book celebrating the joys and challenges of life in college and early twenties. This is a great book for anyone in college right now or anyone who recently graduated. Reading this novel felt like a hug from a best friend asserting that everything was going to turn out all right.  

One of the book’s main focus is about finding a community and your “people.” After coming out as bisexual, Sav explores her identity with other queer students, with all of the highs and heartbreaks that entails. I felt like this novel perfectly captures the feeling at college of having two lives: your old life back home with family and childhood friends, and the new identity at college. That anxiety of your college friends meeting your childhood friends, and the terror of not knowing which jokes or personality to use with both was so vividly written that I felt the secondhand stress.

Old Enough also tackles the friendship breakup and the intense emotions of losing a friendship with a childhood friend. Sav embodied all of the complex emotions that arise, leaving with an ending that had me in tears.

Another topic that Old Enough discusses is surviving and processing sexual assault and what it means to be a survivor. Sav processes and interacts with a range of feelings about her assault, but in the end, there is no one answer: Sav isn’t magically “healed” by the end of the novel. But Old Enough’s resilient and hopeful outlook on the topic makes this such an important novel for anyone who is a survivor.

I am a sucker for a character-driven novel, and Old Enough delivered. Sav felt so relatable as she navigated friendships and romantic situationships. She is naïve and reckless, shy and witty, just everything a young college student still trying to figure everything out is.

I felt so deeply for Sav. I especially loved seeing Sav’s interactions with her crush Wes, as their flirting felt so awkward and so real. Jakobson did a great job at crafting dialogue between young college students that didn’t feel cringy or outdated. While this was an amazing heartfelt book, the one thing that fell flat was her main friends’ personalities. Candace and Vera are supposed to be her best friends from college, but seemed annoying and rude at times. With so much focus on community and friendships, I just had times fully believing the love between the three.

But all together, this book had me laughing, wincing from secondhand embarrassment, and crying. Old Enough is a love letter to the college experience, in all of its beautiful and messy glory.

Rating: 4/5 stars