6 Times We Almost Kissed Review: A Life Beyond Being Needed

The title of Tess Sharpe’s 6 Times We Almost Kissed (And One Time We Did) promises a countable romantic progression. Its deeper subject is less orderly: two teenagers have become so practiced at keeping a family functioning that wanting something for themselves can feel like creating trouble. Penny and Tate’s almost-kisses are compelling when they reveal that conflict. The obstacle is not only whether they recognize attraction. It is whether they can admit a need that nobody has assigned them responsibility for meeting.

Full spoilers ahead: This review discusses the girls’ family histories, their mothers’ surgery, the romantic resolution and the limits of reconciliation with Penny’s mother. It is based on accessible excerpts and cited criticism, rather than a claim of completed firsthand reading.

The novel was originally published January 24, 2023, as confirmed by Little, Brown’s book record. It is contemporary YA romance about two bisexual seventeen-year-olds, with kissing and intense attraction but no graphic sex. Its inclusion in Hawaii’s public-library 2024 Rainbow List for Teens supplies verifiable evidence of library selection. Content considerations include a fatal accident, injury, parental bereavement and abandonment, serious illness, surgery, emotional neglect, trauma, financial strain, strong language, underage substance use and brief sexual harassment or attempted assault.

Being good can become a form of disappearance

Penny’s mother, Lottie, agrees to become a living liver donor for Tate’s mother, Anna. The families combine households during the surgery and recovery period. This arrangement makes the girls’ cooperation practically necessary, regardless of how difficult their relationship feels. Their pact to avoid causing trouble therefore sounds sensible. It also establishes a dangerous standard: their own emotional lives should stay out of the way.

The accessible authorized sample begins with Penny receiving a message about a family meeting while finishing work. Her immediate attempt to anticipate which crisis the meeting concerns is revealing. Before she has any actual information, she is already organizing possible emergencies. The opening locates anxiety within a routine of vigilance rather than introducing it as an abstract personality trait.

This is a precise way to establish the difference between competence and security. A young person can be capable of planning, working and reassuring others while remaining frightened about what will happen next. Others may admire the capability and fail to notice the fear. The girls’ efficiency can therefore become part of the reason their need for support remains hidden.

The romance pushes against that invisibility. Wanting to kiss someone cannot easily be filed as another household task. It introduces an experience that matters because it belongs to the girls, rather than because it keeps an adult comfortable. That is the strongest justification for the romantic plot’s place inside the family story. Desire becomes a claim to a life wider than duty.

The family resemblance conceals important differences

Penny and Tate have been brought into each other’s orbit through their mothers’ friendship. That shared arrangement does not mean they have experienced the same childhood. Penny’s father died in an accident that also injured her; Tate’s father abandoned her and Anna. Their absence from the girls’ lives creates overlapping responsibilities, but the origins and consequences of those responsibilities differ.

The Mary Sue’s review emphasizes the premature adult burdens the teenagers carry. That observation helps explain why their conflict cannot be understood only through the vocabulary of a prickly courtship. Jobs, household needs and fear about a parent’s health occupy attention that another romance might devote to a school rivalry or social misunderstanding.

The comparison between mothers is equally important. Lottie can undertake a generous act for Anna while failing Penny emotionally. These facts do not cancel each other out. The novel’s family structure makes it possible to see a person as devoted in one relationship and damaging in another. For Penny, admiration of her mother’s sacrifice cannot be allowed to invalidate her own hurt.

This is a difficult emotional balance, and the romance should not simplify it by appointing Tate to decide whether Penny has a right to be angry. Tate has her own stake in Lottie’s donation. Loving Penny requires room for an experience of Lottie that differs from the experience of someone whose mother is being helped. That difference gives intimacy something substantial to negotiate.

An almost-kiss can be more than postponed payoff

The six remembered moments and the present-day story organize attraction through recurrence. Repetition can be a blunt instrument: get the characters close, interrupt them, ask the reader to wait again. Sharpe’s structure has a stronger possibility. Each return to the past can revise what the reader thinks hesitation means.

A moment before a major loss carries a different emotional weight from a moment after it. The girls’ history is not simply a collection of missed opportunities. It contains changing conditions under which they could have understood themselves, each other and the risk of wanting more. The same outward movement toward a kiss may therefore represent different inward decisions.

My Book Joy finds the alternating periods useful in balancing the tension of the present. The critical advantage extends beyond relief. Looking backward can prevent the current household crisis from becoming the sole explanation for the relationship. Attraction has a history, and so do the habits used to avoid it.

The limitation is built into the title. Readers arrive knowing that the earlier moments do not culminate in a kiss. Suspense therefore cannot depend only on whether lips meet. Each remembered scene needs another discovery: a changed view of a character, a previously misunderstood kindness or a reason that silence seemed safer at the time. Otherwise the structure risks delivering a sequence of delays with different scenery.

Two viewpoints should produce two kinds of uncertainty

The split perspective lets readers encounter each girl’s private logic rather than treating one as a difficult object the other must solve. This is especially useful in a romance where both have learned to conceal strain. They can misread each other’s outward behavior while the reader understands that neither interpretation is complete.

In her Publishers Weekly interview, Sharpe describes using text exchanges to provide outside perspectives alongside the two first-person voices. Her explanation makes clear that the formal variety is deliberate. The messages offer glimpses of what the girls’ friends perceive while the protagonists remain in denial.

That device has an advantage and a risk. Other people’s certainty can make the romance amusingly obvious, relieving the heaviness of the family plot. But it can also make the protagonists appear to be withholding agreement with a conclusion everyone else has already reached. Their resistance needs to retain a recognizable emotional basis if it is to remain more than a joke about being the last people to notice.

Olivia Farr’s YA Books Central review questions some of that resistance, particularly later in the story. This is a useful reservation because the reader’s superior information can erode patience. Understanding that the girls are frightened does not automatically explain every particular retreat. The story becomes stronger when a hesitation is attached to a specific expected cost.

A concrete improvement would be to make the imagined consequences of a relationship more distinct for each girl. One might fear disrupting a fragile household arrangement; the other might fear being wanted primarily during crisis. The point is not to invent those motives as scenes the book contains. It is to identify the kind of explicit differentiation that would make repeated avoidance feel less mechanically shared.

Romance cannot be another caregiving assignment

Tate and Penny’s practical familiarity makes them unusually well equipped to notice each other. It also raises a concern: they could replicate the burdens they carry at home inside their own relationship. If one girl becomes the person who always stabilizes the other, falling in love might change the recipient of her labor without changing the expectation of endless availability.

The strongest romantic outcome therefore requires mutual permission to be imperfect. A girl who is tired, angry or overwhelmed should not have to prove she is still useful before receiving affection. The relationship should contain ordinary enjoyment as well as support in emergency. Otherwise the couple risks becoming another system maintained by their competence.

This does not mean the book should keep caregiving and romance apart. They are intertwined in these lives, and pretending otherwise would diminish the premise. It means that care should expand rather than consume their identities. Each needs opportunities to be a teenager whose desire is not always subordinated to medical or financial urgency.

The swimming ambitions and everyday work around them are important for the same reason. A possible future must include interests that are not merely extensions of family rescue. A scholarship, job or departure can represent personal growth while also carrying practical benefits. The novel gains depth when it allows ambition to matter on both levels.

The happy ending does not require a universal apology

The title’s promised kiss arrives, and the romantic arc offers a hopeful resolution. Penny’s relationship with Lottie is a different question. Autostraddle’s Casey specifically praises the refusal to give that mother-daughter relationship a sweeping apology and instant forgiveness. This is an important credited observation: romantic completion does not mean every injured bond has been repaired.

That separation makes the ending more credible. A new relationship can provide support without retroactively making a parent’s neglect acceptable. Penny’s future should not depend on achieving a family harmony that she cannot create alone. The ending’s hope is stronger if it permits boundaries and unfinished work alongside love.

It also complicates the meaning of healing. A person can move forward while still carrying anger, grief or an altered physical relationship to the world. The kiss should not stand for the removal of those conditions. It can stand for a decision to let someone close without first having to become a version of oneself untouched by difficulty.

The main reservation is that emotional weight and romantic clarity need to remain in proportion. If the family material is more fully articulated than the final movement toward partnership, readers may understand why the girls are hurt more clearly than why they are now ready. Giving the transition slightly more room would preserve the ending’s hope while showing the decisions beneath it.

Reader fit

This is best approached as an emotionally substantial YA romance with a hopeful destination, rather than a light succession of near-kisses. Common Sense Media’s content guide supports the non-explicit sexual-content description and flags the accident, trauma and attempted assault relevant to preparation. Readers who want minimal family distress or an uncomplicated reconciliation with parents may find the central material demanding.

The novel’s most distinctive question is whether young people who have been needed can also allow themselves to want. Penny and Tate’s attraction matters because it creates room for a life that is not measured solely by how well they absorb other people’s emergencies. Its hopeful ending is persuasive when love offers recognition and possibility, while leaving the girls entitled to boundaries, separate ambitions and care they do not have to earn through usefulness.

Sources and editorial basis

Research used Little, Brown’s book record, the authorized BingeBooks sample, Sharpe’s interview, the public-library Rainbow selection, The Mary Sue, My Book Joy, YA Books Central, Autostraddle and Common Sense Media. This is original analysis of excerpts and cited accounts, not completed firsthand reading or audiobook listening. Source-specific arguments are credited above. This external book is not asserted to be in the HoneyBooks catalog.