Dessen is one of my favorite YA authors because she paints such realistic teens. Yes, they’re white and usually reasonably well off with mostly functional families around them. But still, she digs deep into their lives and makes even an average girl interesting.
Eighteen-year-old Louna Barrett is the daughter of a very successful wedding planner and works most of the weddings herself. She doesn’t necessarily love it but it’s what she knows and she’s good at it, and she only has to do it until she goes off to college. Louna is incredibly guarded, due to a tragedy that we know very little about for the first part of the book. When she meets Ambrose, she can’t stand him because he’s an irresponsible hassle. When her mom hires him to work for the company for the summer, Louna can’t believe it. She’s got to work with this idiot.
Louna and Ambrose first meet at his mother’s wedding, where she has to retrieve him for pictures with his mother and the rest of the family. Her first thought is that he’s really good-looking, but her second thought is that he was too annoying. She says:
He was like that upside-down exclamation point at the beginning of a sentence in Spanish, the mere appearance of which warned of something complicated ahead.
He’s outside flirting with a couple girls instead of inside where he needs to be, and Louna strong-arms him inside. Later he asks her to dance and makes it clear he’s interested in her even though she turns him down. So she isn’t happy to be stuck working with him, but she tries to make the best of it by offloading some of her work to him.
Once it gets going, the book alternates between the current day, where Louna’s dealing with Ambrose, and flashbacks to her time with Ethan, her first real love. We know something really bad happened to him and it takes a little while before we get the full story. Still, we know that Ethan was a great guy and it’s no wonder Louna can’t get over him and move on. In the present day, Louna and Ambrose make a bet that requires him to date just one girl for seven weeks and her to date multiple guys over the same period.
I have to admit that this wasn’t my favorite Dessen novel. I never really warmed up to Ambrose. I mean, it’s not like he was a horrible guy, but he did do some jerky things, even if sometimes it was passively—by not doing or saying something he should have. And Louna herself is a little on the bland side.
That’s not to say that the book doesn’t have strengths. A lot of people will love the background of all the weddings, and I admit even though I find weddings tedious, those elements were actually interesting to me because it went totally behind the scenes and aired some of the dirty laundry. And Louna’s best friend, Jilly, is entertaining and very likable. And supportive. Louna’s mom and her business partner, William, are both good characters, too.
So I’d definitely recommend this for Dessen’s fans, as well as anyone who really digs weddings.
I always like a good book that deals with mental health issues, as long as it does so realistically and non-preachily.* The Nature of Jade fits the bill.
All the Bright Places sort of destroyed me for a day, it was so emotionally demanding. I mean, the story took me through the wringer and once I’d finished it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and reliving the emotions I’d felt while reading it. I came to the book without being aware of the hype and the comparisons to Eleanor and Park and The Fault in Our Stars. Despite that, Eleanor and Park was exactly the book it made me think of, not because of the story, but because of the emotional depth and the journey it took me on.
This book distressed me. Probably not in what could be said to be a good way, but in the right way (the way it was intended to).
This is really a weird little collection. I got it for the Ruby Oliver prequel short story by E. Lockhart.
If you’re sick of all the romanticized obsessive love that’s in YA literature today, this is the antidote.
Have you ever wished to be a fly on the wall somewhere totally inaccessible to you? Gretchen Yee does, and, strangely and without explanation, she gets her wish.
I joined one of those new monthly book clubs where they send you a book you aren’t specifically expecting, and this was the first one they sent me. I hadn’t heard of it, although I was at Barnes and Noble the other day and they had about 5 outward-facing copies on display, so I’m guessing it’s gaining in popularity. It’s certainly got good reviews on Amazon (4.8 stars, which you rarely see).
This series contains some of the most readable books I’ve come across in a while. I devoured all four of them in a week (while reading some other books, too). Admittedly, they are short and I was trying to catch up on my Goodreads challenge (finally 82 books in, 0 behind at the time of writing) right before NaNo started because I don’t get much reading done in November, but still. I couldn’t put the last three down and read them in one day each. The first one took me three days because I have a job and other stuff I have to do.
The premise of the series sounds a little underwhelming—fifteen-year-old Ruby is having serious boy and friend trouble. But there’s so much more to it than that. First off, due to some real nastiness on the part of her boyfriend of six months and best friend of ten years, she loses both as well as her two other really good friends. Basically, her friend Kim steals her boyfriend. They do this highly transparent thing where he breaks up with Ruby and a few days later is going out with Kim, and everyone acts like they behaved nobly because technically he and Ruby were already broken up. Then because of some weirdness, Ruby ends up going to the dance with the ex in question and kisses him—he kisses her back but when they’re caught, claims it was all her. So then everyone thinks she’s a tramp. As a result of all this, she starts having panic attacks and ends up visiting a shrink twice a week, which results in something that only makes her situation worse. In the first book (The Boyfriend List), her shrink has her write up a list of all boys she’s had any kind of romantic or quasi-romantic contact with. She comes up with a list of fifteen but then not-very-cleverly discards an old copy of the list, which Kim finds and distributes to everyone at the school. Suddenly Ruby’s a “slut.”
You can imagine how this would be stressful. But it sets up a pretty good story. The first book is structured in an interesting way, too. Although it’s basically told in chronological order, each chapter is one of the fifteen boys on the list and focuses on explaining that past situation plus the one in current story time. In the second book (The Boy Book), she’s got one of her friends back and a new one, and a potential boyfriend, but that goes south when she has to turn him down because her friend likes him. The third book (The Treasure Map of Boys) is mostly about that same boy, but the nature of real friendship comes up, too. The final book (Real Live Boyfriends) delves more into the nature of relationships.
While the series itself has a clear arc, each book also tells a complete story. Ruby herself is hilarious. She’s quirky (I feel like that has become a sort of cliched description, but in this case it’s true) without being weird in a bad way. She’s troubled and going through some pretty horrible stuff, but it doesn’t get to her as much as it might others. The other characters are also well-drawn, all through Ruby’s eyes. The books are set in Seattle, too, which is fun because I’m nearby and sort of know some of the places they talk about. The dialogue is fantastic and Lockhart perfectly captures Ruby’s world. Lockhart’s clearly one of the most talented YA authors around right now. I can’t believe it took me so long to find her.
This is a remarkable book that lives up to the hype surrounding it. Most of you will probably already know of this book, so you’ll know it’s about a black girl whose unarmed, black male friend gets shot by a white cop in front of her. Obviously a topical subject, but the book really delivers a great fiction experience all while introducing readers to a world they probably don’t know at all, as well as an inside perspective on what black people regularly face. I love reading books set in places or cultures I have little to no exposure to, even though it’s uncomfortable at times, and that was all true for this book.