The Geography of You and Me - Jennifer E. Smith

RATING: ★★★☆☆

I’ve been having a drought. I’m a single, young girl reading books and looking for nice, attractive guys in those books. I like to think about them - about how I’ll find my own Gus someday. Or Henry from The Time Traveler’s Wife. Just a great guy and not a guy like all the boys walking around here that I would never date in my life.

Unfortunately for me, I’ve hit a cute guy drought in my books. Let’s Get Lost featured the most annoying guy I’ve read about in a while and the books before that didn’t even feature any guys.

This cover might be in my top 10 favourite covers of all time. It's gorgeous.

So I was super excited to pick up The Geography of You And Me by Jennifer E. Smith, which is boasted as a “magic, magic book. It will take you to a place where we all want to live, where true love overcomes any distance”.

You know what that sounds like? Like a Disney World advertisement and I love everything Disney.

Plot

The Geography of You and Me is the story of Lucy and Owen. They both live in NYC when suddenly all the power in the city goes out. Lucy, rich penthouse girl, is stuck in the elevator with Owen, the son of the caretaker of the building. The two have noticed each other before, but never really talked - until this night filled with darkness.

After that night, Owen makes a road trip all over America with his dad while Lucy moves to Europe with her parents. How do you keep in touch when the world is literally in between you?

Boy Drought

Owen was a nice enough male lead. The chapters alternated between the point of view of Lucy and Owen, so it’s nice to really get insight into the boy’s thoughts and feelings. However, I think Owen still believed he lived in a 1950s Disney movie. 

After moving away from NYC, he decides to send postcards to Lucy. Owen believes e-mails are too direct. Great, very romantic Owen, but postcards take forever to get delivered and you can’t really write personal things on postcard. A+ for effort, F for practicality. 

However, Lucy is charmed enough by the idea and replies to his postcards with e-mails, like every normal person living in this century would do. I liked that Lucy was critical of Owen and his intentions. She definitely liked him, but also played the field when living in Europe. It made the book more realistic than if it was a “I saw him and I want to marry him” kind of story. Yet, I couldn’t really relate to Lucy. I’m not sure if she didn’t have enough depth or that she just wasn’t my kind of person - something just didn’t click.

But I could relate to Owen even less. It was the postcards, it was the way he thought about certain things (turns out, he never keeps in touch with anyone), it was his constant lack of spontaneity and then suddenly, and unexplained, an impromptu trip somewhere.

I know plenty of Owens, so he’s realistic enough. But I don’t want to read about all the guys I already know.

Life is more than boys

A book is not all about the male lead. It’s about the storyline and the setting and the characterisation,…. In this case, the description was great. I’ve been to both NYC and London and I can guarantee you that the author wrote the places exactly like they were. Jennifer E. Smith describes the smells, sights and feel you get from a city in a perfect way. This made the book enjoyable to read, especially since I recognised most things she wrote about.

But Lucy and Owen were still only so-so. They weren’t awful, but they also weren’t amazing. I like to relate to at least one character in the book, to really feel what they are feeling. And I feel like the alternated narrated chapters would have been perfect to connect with both of them - it just didn’t work out for me that way. I can’t pinpoint it, but then reading is always really personal, so who knows exactly what it was? All I know is that the setting didn't make up for it.

Conclusion

I don’t want to break this book down, because the building blocks were all there: there was characterisation, setting, tension, a good plot,…. It just didn’t come together for me. Maybe if I hadn’t read it in the middle of my boy-book-drought I would have liked it better. 

3 and a half stars for the book at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Let's Get Lost - Adi Alsaid

RATING: ★★☆☆☆

In case you couldn’t tell you from my previous reviews, I am a feminist. A proud gender studies student, who is not very extreme or loud in her beliefs, but very convinced that men and women should be on the same level and who believes society’s view on women (as just beautiful, quiet, “they have to love me” dolls) is very unfair.

So when there is a book that is well-written and has a charming and endearing female lead in it, but an entitled, rude guy who is not called out at all on the way he treats this girl, I’m done. 

Plot

Let’s Get Lost by Adi Alsaid is the story of Leila, a young girl who is making a road trip to the Northern Lights. It’s a long trip and on the way she meets Hudson, Bree, Elliot and Sonia. The story is mostly about them - until the last chapter, where we finally find out what happened to Leila.

I adored Leila, who is very reminiscent of Alaska in John Green’s Looking for Alaska. She’s lost and confused but has a really good heart. She’s also intelligent, a go-getter and has an amazing warmth to her that make people open up to her (I call it warmth, because if it would just be her good looks, I would like her a lot less - she would be another cliché). She leaves her home and goes to a garage to get her car fixed right before the big journey to Canada. The car fixer? Rude, entitled, stuck-up Hudson, who she somehow falls in love with?!

At this part of the book, I was already confused. I didn’t know Leila at all at that point, but Hudson’s true colours shone through pretty fast and I don’t know why Leila didn’t get into her fixed car and thanked her lucky stars that she got rid of him. But she didn’t do that - she actually writes him cards throughout her whole journey and she misses him.

But then came Hudson....

Why do I hate Hudson so much? Hudson is a mechanic/future med student who has the biggest interview on his life the day after he meets Leila. However, Leila is hot so he drops everything to go to an island with her. He falls asleep, he misses his interview and even though he suggested they would go to the island and she offered to go back home, Hudson blames Leila for ruining his future. And not in a silent treatment way, but in a very crude way that makes you cringe while reading it.

The effect of this? Every reader hates Hudson. But maybe a positive side effect was that I instantly became protective of Leila. I felt bad for her and her inability to stand up for herself and I wanted to protect her from Hudson - at least for a bit.

Leila continues her journey and meets Bree, a runaway teen, Elliot, a dumped teen on prom night and Sonia, my second favourite character who has to deal with the death of her boyfriend. And while Leila helps all of them, she’s also thinking about Hudson, which gets old really fast. They spend a day/night together and then he treated her like trash, yet she misses him? I didn’t get it and I must admit that I skimmed over the parts where she was talking about Hudson. I loved Leila and I didn’t want her to be ruined by her silly notion of love. So maybe I didn’t really love her, but certain parts of her. I’m not sure.

I don’t want to get into too much detail about the other characters, since it will ruin the whole book for any readers. All I can say: Stick it out until the end, because there will be a plot twist.

What I can say about them is that I hated how everything always had some kind of happy ending - Leila is only with them for 48 hours max and yet she helps them get their happy ending. As far as I know, not everyone immediately gets what they want and that would have been good to have incorporated in the book. Especially since I feel the author read a lot of John Green and really tried to tap into his audience. Unfortunately, what he missed is that John Green teaches us that life cannot be controlled and you get what you get and you have to deal with it.

Conclusion

So my aching feminist heart cannot give this book more than 2 stars. I hope Leila returns in another story and can be salvaged, but right now, Hudson just ruined the whole book for me. I wish he would Get Lost.

Everything Leads To You - Nina LaCour

RATING: ★★★★☆

I love Hollywood and all books relating to it. The glamour, the stars, the drama - I love it. All my favorite TV-shows are dramatic and glamorous and if they take place somewhere in California: I'll love them even more.

Secretly, I bought this book only for the cover. I'm not even ashamed.

What I loved about Everything Leads to You is that the setting is glamorous - movie sets in Hollywood- the stars on those sets are glamorous, the big houses are glamorous, but the lead character Emi isn't glamorous. She's just an average girl that any European-my-hair-is-always-a-mess girl loves.

What is glamorous is the amazing adventure Emi is thrown into. As a set designer, she goes to deceased people's homes and buys furniture for different movie sets. And sometimes, those dead people are big time movie stars who hide notes to unknown people in the cover of an old record. What do you do when you find that letter? How do you find someone (if they are not on twitter)? These are all questions Emi has to figure out.

Nina LaCour knows how to write

Nina LaCour is a famous YA writer, especially for Hold Still which is on my never ending to-be-read list, and this book once again shows why Nina is famous. The writing is effortless and easy to read. It's like reading an episode of Pretty Little Liars (I never read the books so I have no clue how the writing is in that, sorry!) - there is tension, drama and glamour in a very easy to digest style. It reads like the words just flow out of LaCour's pen, though as a writer, I can recognise all the work that went into writing such an easy style. Now I know that writing style preferences are very personal, so here's the opening of the book - to give you a real feel of what it's like:

 "Five texts are waiting for me when I get out of my English final. One is from Charlotte saying she finished early and decided to meet up with our boss, so she'll see me at Toby's house later. One is from Toby, saying 7 p.m.: Don't forget!  And three are from Morgan.

 I don't read those yet."

See? This little fragment, the first few words of the book already raise a few important questions: Who is Charlotte? Who is Toby? And especially, who is Morgan and why are we not answering her texts?

It reads quickly and easily -with no difficult literary tools - just an easy YA novel, but that's a serious skill that many readers underestimate nowadays. AND it never reads like a dumb novel at any time. Unlike the childlike and basic narrating of Laurel in Love Letters To The Dead, Emi is mature and observant of the world around her - something which shows in the writing.

Can I eat a pizza with Emi?

I didn't relate to Emi - she lives in a too glamorous world with a too glamorous job and too big of an adventure. However, that was totally fine, since Emi reads like she is your best friend, because like I said before, she's not glamorous. She's a tad naive when it comes to love, she's a bit dramatic and totally sweet and loveable, and don't we all have a best friend like that? I wish I could invite Emi over and talk to her about the letter she found and what to do about it. Pizza and a Hollywood movie - what more do girls need? Oh, and I would also invite Emaline from The Moon and More to discuss growing up and sucky relationships/reality. I feel like Emi and Emaline could be best friend too (and we would be Emi, Emaline and Emma - how cool?).

Every Hollywood tale has a flaw

For all the amazing things in Everything Leads to You, there was one thing I didn't like: the predictability. Finding the letter was very original and new - it started a good adventure. However, in that adventure, there are so many things that you know will happen. The only surprise for me was finding out in the beginning that Emi was gay. That shouldn't have been a surprise, because who cares, but due to the lack of diversity in YA, it was. Other than that, a reader can easily predict what will happen and at what point in the story. The ending isn't shocking either, which is something a lot of readers want.

But does that really matter? I guess it depends on the reader. I need good writing and a main character I love to like a book - predictably doesn't really matter. So I loved this book, but I do realise that many people prefer a book which is unpredictable and they might struggle with this book.

Conclusion

I would recommend this book to almost everyone I know, because I LOVED IT. However, as I said, I'm very aware of the flaw of predictability. So maybe I wouldn't recommend it to every single person I know - I can already imagine one friend who would hate it. But I can't live with myself if I don't give this book at least 4 out of 5 stars - it wasn't the best book I've read this year, but it was damn close.