Review: "Someone to Daydream About" by Sydney Langford

 

Someone to Daydream About by Sydney Langford
Published March 2026 via Farrar, Straus and Giroux
★★★

Natalie just wants to make enough money to save the Deaf Center her family runs—and Felix, pop star extraordinaire, needs an ASL tutor and is willing to spend $$$ to have Natalie on call 24/7. It's a match made in heaven...if they can just get their dang teenage hormones in line.

I have a habit of reading a book description once, putting the book on my TBR, and then completely forgetting what it's about by the time I read the book. Why reread the description when you already know it's something you want to read? By the time I picked this one up, I'd forgotten that deafness (which I suspect was why I shelved it in the first place) was a feature of the book, so I had the unexpected/unplanned experience of reading a bunch of books involving deafness in a row—The Queen's Granddaughter, which has a significant side character with hearing loss; Someone to Daydream About; Mother Tongue, which is a memoir about deafness and deaf culture; and (at the time of writing, one of my current reads) The Hearing Test, which is about a woman who experiences sudden hearing loss.

I like getting the different takes, and I love that Natalie is so passionate about making sure sign is accessible to her community. There's some quiet conflict about money and accessibility, which makes sense—if Mother Tongue reinforced anything, it's that the deaf (and Deaf, for people who prefer the capital letter) community is continually and systematically pushed to the margins.

I did wish that a bit less of this book had been so...awash in teenage hormones. I thought for a while that I would have liked the book better if it had been coded more adult romance (with older characters, etc.) and less YA romance, but I think the author might be quite young, which makes the target audience make a little more sense here. That is...maybe I'm just over the hump of my YA reading days (and so this book is for many people, just not so much for me), but I'd still have preferred a little less teenage dramatics. I enjoyed this a bit more in theory than in practice.