Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between is a novel published by Jennifer E. Smith in 2015. It is a novel almost exclusively geared toward its Young Adult genre readership and the issues related to their romantic pursuits. The entire story takes place within a single twelve-hour period during which its two young protagonists, Aidan and Clare, decide whether or not to remain romantically intact in a long-distance relationship on the eve of their both going away to different colleges.
The chapters are actually identified as "Stop #1" and "Stop #2" and so on. They are then further delineated by where the action takes place and the specific time during this twelve-hour countdown. For instance, "Stop #5, The Bowling Alley, 9:17 PM" begins with Aidan pulling into the parking lot of the IncrediBowl at precisely that time. Adding to this unusual structure of the book is that both the first "Stop" is preceded by and the final "Stop" is followed by short sections which are both subtitled "Prologue" despite the second appearing at the spot usually reserved for a section subtitled "Epilogue." The point is that the end of the story of Aidan & Clare is the beginning of new stories about Aidan and Clare.
The single most insightful and useful passage occurs in that second "Prologue" when the narrator writes "Over the past twelve hours, they’ve spent all their words—generously, riotously, fully—like a couple of gamblers throwing down every last chip without a single thought for tomorrow." This quote effectively sums up the story. It is about a boy and girl in the ambiguous twilight between high school adolescence and college adolescence spending the day driving around town and revisiting all the old haunts marking their romance and talking about the past while weighing the possibilities for the future.
Even at more than two-hundred-fifty pages, the novel moves along at a fast pace. This could be because many of those pages are comprised of very short paragraphs of dialogue. Equally true is that it could be because ultimately not much happens because no great conflict is at work. The only thing that genuinely hangs in the balance is whether the two characters will choose to continue their relationship as a long-distance romance or not. Nothing else in their lives which comes to light as a result of the twelve hours the reader spends listening to them talk has any emotional significance.
