Review: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Tags: YA, romance, he-said/she-said, NYC

Summary

Dash’s lackluster Christmas break begins to look up the moment he finds the red notebook nestled between his favorite author’s books in the Strand bookstore in New York City. Inside contains instructions from a girl named Lily. Suddenly, Dash finds himself corresponding via notebook to a girl he has never seen but is getting to know, wandering all around the city to complete her tasks and to set up tasks for her.

For the first time in her life, Lily is spending Christmas without most of her family. Her love-obsessed gay older brother creates the notebook to give her a shot at finding a guy who’s right for her. As Lily confides more and more in the red notebook, however, she wonders if the boy behind the words is actually real, or merely a figment of her (desperate and lonely) imagination.

Will these two teenagers find one another in the whirlwind that is a New York City Christmas?

Review

Fans of Rachel Cohn and David Levithan’s collaborative novels will no doubt enjoy DASH & LILY’S BOOK OF DARES. Full of the writing duo’s trademark humor and insight, this book can be read on multiple levels by all different types of readers.

On a basic level, DASH & LILY’S BOOK OF DARES is an entertaining scavenger hunt of self-discovery and romance, through one of the greatest cities in the world. Beginning at the Strand, arguably one of the world’s most interesting bookstores, and hitting many of NYC’s most famous tourist-ridden holiday stops, this book take us through a mini-tour of the city, and giving us snapshot glimpses of just why New York has long been considered the city of opportunity and possibility.

Even better, Dash and Lily wander through the city with a hearty dose of wit. Dash is that brand of self-deprecating, too-smart-for-his-own-good, disillusioned and highly philosophical teenage boy that is rare in real life but utterly appealing in both life and fiction. Lily is more of the scatterbrained eternal optimist type. The two of them often don’t seem like they should work out, but that’s the beauty of a love story.

On a deeper level, DASH & LILY doesn’t quite fully succeed in being the introspective, philosophical stimulus it seems to want to be. I mentioned that Dash sometimes thinks too much for his own good. What starts out as a merely entertaining courtship turns into an attempt to explore the deeper sides of relationships, self-esteem, and people’s need for companionship. Halfway through the book, Dash does the kind of turnaround in his notebook revelations that would leave me two steps from freaking out and worried that I had done something wrong if I were Lily. What could have been a feel-good romance changes as a result into an attempt to explore the messiness of people coming together in a romance. I’m all for messy relationships, but I’m not sure I bought that the two of them liked each other well enough before the turning point to continue their communication the way they did. It felt to me like different sides of the characters tried to come out in the second half of the book, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that the characters would act like that in those situations.

Despite that, most readers should be enamored with DASH & LILY’S BOOK OF DARES. It’s not exactly a feel-good romance, but would make a nice break from the real world in terms of holiday reads.

Similar Authors
E. Lockhart

Writing: 4/5
Characters: 3/5
Plot: 3/5

Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5


Cover discussion: 4.5 out of 5 - It is so gorgeous! Very colorful, unique, and memorable.

Random House / Oct. 26, 2010 / Hardcover / 272pp. / $16.99

Review copy received from publisher.

Review: Very LeFreak by Rachel Cohn

Tags: YA, college, technology, addiction, sex

Rating: 2.5 out of 5


Summary

Columbia University freshman Very LeFreak is a vivacious, confident girl, the life of the party and eternal schemer of outrageous activities. True, her busyness makes her rather scatterbrained, non-academically inclined, and a bit of a heartbreaker. But that doesn’t really matter, because her heart’s taken by El Virus, the mysterious man she “met” on the Internet and is madly in love with. Trouble is, Very hasn’t heard from El Virus in weeks and months, despite the fact that she is constantly checking her phone, email, and IMs to see if he’s contacted her. When her technology addiction begins to seriously negatively affect her real life, Very decides to go on a mission to discover the whereabouts of El Virus.

Review

VERY LEFREAK is an unfortunate disappointment by a highly respectable author. It contains the chatty, witty, and pop culture reference-loaded writing of her previous books, but lacks cohesion and the ability to make us empathize with the characters.

Very is an appealing character because her thoughts—and therefore her narration—are refreshingly fast-paced, modern, and slightly scattered in the way that many 21st-century teens are, whether we admit it or not. She is unlike any character I’ve encountered in literature before, with her ever-ready repertoire of pop culture, random tangents, and connections we’d never make ourselves, but which seem perfectly logical coming from Very’s mind.

However, the fact that we are in Very’s head so much makes it extremely difficult for us to grasp what is going on in the story. Very’s observations are certainly interesting, but there is a lack of narrative cohesion tying together Very with the people in her life. The little we glean of Very’s friends is so colored by Very’s desires for who she wants them to be that we don’t get even close to a solid picture of who they are. While I understand that this may in fact be the manifestation of the typical limitations of fiction writing—everything we know about the characters, we know through a biased lens—the paradox doesn’t completely translate into reader enjoyability and comprehension here.

Similarly, there seemed to be a lack of plot in VERY LEFREAK. The book is so much a dissection of Very’s thought processes that it oftentimes forgets to effectively move the story along via relevant events, conversations, and even overarching themes. The technology addiction that the book’s synopsis claims Very suffers from actually doesn’t even play a major role in the book—which disappointed me, as I thought it was an interesting and pertinent topic that could’ve better been explored. I read about half of the book before realizing that absolutely nothing pertaining to character growth had happened yet. One can get away with that in an adult book, but for YA fiction, that just might be the kiss of death.

Overall, I believe VERY LEFREAK might be an interesting read for writers and academics curious about issues regarding fiction’s metalanguage—are the supporting characters really incohesive, or is that just a product of the intensely close third-person narration of this book? Can a story be a story without character development or plot?—but I fear it may be a struggle for the YA audience it’s being marketed at. Appreciators of well-written, character-driven novels might give this one a go and find that they enjoy it immensely.

Similar Authors
E. Lockhart
Diana Peterfreund

Writing: 4/5
Characters: 2/5
Plot: 1/5

Overall Rating: 2.5 out of 5


Cover discussion: 2.5 out of 5 - I do like the style, the whimsical feel of it, but that is not AT ALL how I pictured the vivacious and ineffable Very to look like.

Knopf / Jan. 12, 2010 / Hardcover / 320pp. / $16.99

Review copy received from publisher.