4. The Loser's Guide to Love and Life

The Loser's Guide to Love and Life (A.E. Cannon, June 2008)

Teen lit is so easy to read between journal articles, and I'm afraid I won't be able to get into adult lit for a while. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I'm not familiar with the author's other work, but she's won some impressive YA awards. The book is pretty entertaining. It focuses on four teens, but I'd say that Ed is the main character. He works at a video store and doesn't have his own name tag yet, so he wears one left behind by a former employee named Sergio. You see where this is going, right? So a cute girl comes into the store and thinks his name is Sergio. Ed takes the opportunity to create a suave alter ego and doesn't correct her. It kinds of reminds me of John/Giovanni in Hard Love, not that the situations or stories are the same.

The novel is made up of alternating chapters from the four characters' persepectives. Ed and Scout, his best female friend, get first person narratives. Quark, Ed's next-door neighbor and other best friend writes in his lab manual, and Ellie, Ed's love interest, writes letters to her family and mentally composes unsent emails to her ex-boyfriend. I'm all about the epistolary device, but in this case, Quark and Ellie are less developed characters because of it. I'm also not a huge fan of shifting first-person narratives. It seems cheap and easy, instead of letting the reader see the characters through the eyes of the narrator, whether omniscient or a protagonist.

So, this one was okay, and a decent way to spend a couple of hours on a lazy Sunday, but it probably won't stick with me like some of the better YA fiction I've found.

51. Which Brings Me to You

Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions (Steve Almond & Julianna Baggott, 2006)

More Steve Almond. I tend to request several things from one writer at the same time, so my holds often come in as themed batches. I liked this a ton, and think the collaboration worked wonderfully. The story opens on a failed wedding reception hookup between Jane and John. The two, who live in different states, decide to get to know one another through confessions they'll send back and forth through the mail. Except for the first and last chapters, the entire novel is made up of this correspondence. The premise sounds too cute, but the execution was really interesting and unexpected.

This book was devastating. That's overly dramatic, I know. But several passages, especially from Jane's letters, could have been ripped from my head, word for word. It's hard to see thoughts and feelings exactly like my own, laid bare on the page. The confessions are wonderful and terrible, and I believed in these two broken, sad people trying to make a connection. The final chapter let me down just a tiny bit, but don't let that stop you from trying this one out.

13. Heart on My Sleeve

Heart on My Sleeve (Ellen Wittlinger, 2004)

Ellen Wittlinger wrote one of my favorite books of all time, Hard Love. She has a knack for writing really believable characters who aren't perfect kids but make you really root for them to figure things out and grow as people. Heart on My Sleeve is told all in emails, IMs, letters, and postcards, and it works nicely. When done well, I really enjoy the modern-day epistolary device because it's a slick way to do roving stream of consciousness without confusing the reader. This is especially important for younger audiences. Not everybody can create such organic character voices like Wittlinger, though.

This story centers around a boy and girl who meet at an college visit at the end of their senior years and strike up a correspondance over the summer. They each also talk to their friends, sisters, and parents. A lot happens during the summer that I won't spoil here. It's really interesting to see how the relationship affects their separate lives and the people around them, and what happens when they meet again face to face after months of writing and thinking they know each other so well. Read this.