56 - Reading Riot no.1

Part of my New Year's Resolutions: to read one book a week. The series will be called Reading Riot, and this is week one.

I read this book:

Yes, it is a teen fiction/kind-of teen romance novel. I have guilty pleasures, and that genre happens to fall right in that category. However, I have no shame in sharing this book because I thought it was great.

The premise of the book is a red Moleskine notebook that a teenage girl leaves in a bookstore for an unknown teenage boy to (hopefully) find and complete the challenge written inside. The girl is Lily, and the boy is Dash. Two 16-year-olds looking for an adventure during a particularly boring Christmas holiday in New York City. Over half of the book is dedicated to Dash and Lily finding new, unique ways to pass the notebook back and forth.

The really cool thing about books written by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan is the two parts are written by separate people. Not only that, they don't even know how the story is really gonna turn out because they just email the chapters to each other as they write them sequentially. It makes the story and characters more real, in my opinion.

The likelihood of most of the events in the book actually happening is slim. However, the characters felt very real to me. Dash and Lily are two VERY different people, but sometimes it happens that way. Different personalities are attracted to each other all the time. Dash has a very large vocabulary and knows about most things. Lily is a naive idealist who is the youngest in a very large extended family. Personally, I found both characters very likable. To some, Dash may have come across as a tad condescending and unrealistic with his use of large words, but I disagree. He's not the kind of person trying to be condescending, he just loves words. And he means well throughout the book, not trying to make anyone feel inferior. As for his use of the words all the time, he has a nightly ritual of finding a new word to love in his dictionary... I think with a habit like that, it's very realistic for him to have a vocabulary like that. Haha.

Basically, I was sucked into this book. It's only about 250 pages, but I read it in less than a day. It was a very easy book to read, and I found myself wishing there was more. I thought the ending was perfect. Plus, VERY limited swearing and no sex! Like I said, teen fiction is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. So if you're not into teen fiction, you wouldn't like this book. But it was very well written (in my opinion). David and Rachel did a fine job, yet again. (See also Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist. That one's a bit more PG-13, though.)