Maybe Someday

Maybe Someday Review

Maybe Someday is the novel Colleen Hoover wrote when she decided to genuinely complicate the love story rather than simply delay its resolution. Published in 2014 with a companion album of original songs written by Griffin Peterson, it remains her most formally ambitious work — the music that Ridge and Sydney write together exists as actual recorded songs that readers can listen to while reading, turning the novel into something closer to a multimedia experience.

Sydney is twenty-two and discovers, with humiliating specificity, that her boyfriend has been sleeping with her best friend. She moves out with nowhere to go, and her downstairs neighbour Ridge — a songwriter who is deaf and communicates primarily through his phone — offers her a room. He has a girlfriend. She is trying to rebuild her life. They begin collaborating on lyrics through text messages, and the connection between them becomes impossible to classify as merely creative.

Hoover is unusually direct about the ethical stakes. Sydney and Ridge are emotionally unfaithful to the people they are supposed to be committed to, and the novel does not allow them to feel good about it. Ridge’s girlfriend Maggie is not a villain; she is a person, and her presence gives the story a moral texture that most romance fiction smooths away entirely.

The portrayal of Ridge’s deafness is handled with evident research and consistency. His perspective on music, composition, and the way he experiences sound is woven through the narrative without sentimentality or condescension — a rare achievement in mainstream fiction.

The book’s weakness is its ending, which relies on a coincidence that tidies things a little too neatly. But the journey there is Hoover at her most thoughtful.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — Hoover’s most structurally inventive novel and her most honest engagement with the ethics of falling for someone you shouldn’t.

Reading Guides

• Colleen Hoover Books in Order: Complete Reading Guide and Where to Start (2026)

The Companion Album

Hoover collaborated with musician Griffin Peterson to write the songs that Ridge and Sydney compose together in the novel, releasing them as a companion album simultaneously with the book’s publication in 2014. The songs are available to listen to while reading, turning Maybe Someday into something genuinely unusual in mainstream fiction: a novel whose emotional climaxes can be experienced through two different sensory registers simultaneously.

The decision reflects an unusual authorial ambition. Hoover did not want Ridge’s music to be simply described; she wanted readers to be able to hear it. The songs Peterson wrote are integrated with the plot at specific points, and the experience of reading the relevant scenes while listening is meaningfully different from reading them without the accompaniment. This formal ambition — multimedia before multimedia fiction had a recognizable shape — is one of the reasons Maybe Someday occupies a distinctive place in Hoover’s catalog.

The novel was adapted for a stage musical in 2015, another medium that suits its material. The centrality of songwriting to the love story makes theatrical adaptation more natural here than for most of her work.

Ridge’s Deafness

The research evident in Hoover’s portrayal of Ridge’s deafness distinguishes the novel from the mainstream fiction that uses disability as characterization shorthand. Ridge does not experience music the way hearing people do — he experiences rhythm, vibration, and the structural mathematics of composition — and his approach to songwriting reflects a genuine engagement with what music is at its technical foundation rather than its experiential surface.

The relationship between Ridge’s deafness and his compositional process is one of the more formally interesting elements in Hoover’s back catalog. The idea that a great songwriter might hear music differently, or not hear it in the conventional sense at all, is not used for novelty but for genuine characterization: Ridge understands songs as structures before he experiences them as feeling, which shapes both how he composes and how he engages with Sydney’s lyrics.

Maggie and Moral Weight

The presence of Ridge’s girlfriend Maggie in the novel — a fully drawn person rather than an obstacle to be dismissed — is the moral choice that elevates Maybe Someday above most forbidden-love romances. Maggie knows something the reader learns gradually, and when that knowledge is revealed, it reframes the novel’s central ethical problem in ways that are more complicated than a simple condemnation of emotional infidelity would allow.

Hoover’s decision to give Maggie genuine depth costs the novel some romantic simplicity — it is harder to simply root for Sydney and Ridge when the person their connection hurts is rendered with sympathy — and gains it something more valuable: a love story in which the right outcome is not obvious, and in which the characters must genuinely earn the resolution rather than arriving at it by default.

Songwriting as Shared Language

The songs Ridge and Sydney write together function in the novel as a form of communication that is more honest than their spoken interactions. What they cannot say directly, they say in lyrics. What Ridge experiences as vibration and structure, Sydney experiences as emotional meaning — and the collaboration bridges that gap in a way that their conversations cannot always manage. Hoover uses this dynamic to explore how different people can share an experience while experiencing it completely differently, and how that difference can be the basis for connection rather than its obstacle.

The multimedia ambition of Maybe Someday — novel plus companion album, an invitation to read and listen simultaneously — reflects Hoover’s instinct to push her work beyond what a single medium can contain. That instinct, visible in the real confessions of Confess and the companion novel structure of Hopeless/Losing Hope, is one of the reasons her catalog rewards engagement beyond individual titles.