| Title | : | The Geography of You and Me |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0316254770 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780316254779 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 337 |
| Publication | : | First published April 15, 2014 |
| Awards | : | Goodreads Choice Award Young Adult Fiction (2014) |
Lucy and Owen’s relationship plays out across the globe as they stay in touch through postcards, occasional e-mails, and—finally—a reunion in the city where they first met.
A carefully charted map of a long-distance relationship, Jennifer E. Smith’s new novel shows that the center of the world isn't necessarily a place. It can be a person, too.
The Geography of You and Me Reviews
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Find all of my reviews at:
http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/
1 Star with a bonus ½ Star for a good cover/title.
WARNING: I SPOIL THE CRAP OUT OF THIS BOOK
Lucy is super emo because her parents are never around and she’s friendless. (How do you avoid the oft present “we’re dealing with teenagers, where the hell are the parents” question? Well, this book just ships the parents off to Paris, leaving their 16 year old daughter at home in New York City all alone. Problem solved.)
Owen is super emo since his mom recently passed away and his father moved them to New York City. He’s less than thrilled to be completing his senior year in the Big Apple and is counting down the seconds until he can go to college somewhere in the Upper Northwest.
Although they live in the same building, the two have never met. Lucy is more of a penthouse gal and Owen is the building manager’s son, residing in a tiny basement apartment. During a citywide blackout the two find themselves stuck together in an elevator and, when they are eventually freed, decide to explore the city together. New York City. During rush hour. In a blackout. Yeah, that sounds safe. I mean it’s not like there’s a history of people friggin’ LOOTING or anything when these types of situations have occurred in the past.
They end up back on the roof of their building and after one magical night of instalove together, the two don’t cross paths again. Because it would be super awkward to like go up/down the damn stairs to say “Hi”, but it wasn’t awkward at all to spend the night with a stranger.
Instead, Owen’s dad gets canned from the charity-case-job he was given and the two decide to road trip it across ‘Murica, which is totally not a case of bad parenting and is instead cool because Owen already has enough credits to graduate . . .
If dude already has enough credits to graduate, why didn’t he just graduate and start applying to colleges for early admission instead of being miserable in the NYC public school system????? Me = so confuzzled. I guess I’m supposed to leave that one as an “it is what it is” type of situation and let them go ahead onthe highway to helltheir merry way.
Lucy’s father ends up getting a job in Edinburgh, Scotland and her parents decide they finally give enough of a shit about their daughter to buy the poor girl a plane ticket and allow her to cohabitate with them. There Lucy experiences what I like to call the “Bella Swan Syndrome”. Although friendless, helpless, and hopeless in NYC,BellaLucy somehow finds herself seated at the popular table once she moves across the pond with a handsome lacrosse player hanging on her every word.
Bet you can see where this is going . . .
Yes, although Lucy and Owen only spent a nanosecond together in real life and now live roughly 14 million light years apart - not to mention the fact that new fella Liam (his name just has to be something dreamy like Liam, right?) is Mr. Righthererightnow - Lucy is overwrought with guilt and knows her heart truly belongs to Owen.
Yada, yada, yada, Lucy and Owen communicate via postcards a la snail mail like it's the Stone Age, more boring stuff happens, and the two eventually find a way to get together for a couple of magical days by meetingat the top of the Empire State Buildingin the middle of the Brooklyn Bridgeback at their old apartment building. The end. Thank God.
ARC provided by NetGalley. Thank you, NetGalley!!!! -
Funny how the story started with a total black out from New York all the way to Canada when our own power went out too. It’s like fate or something and just like fate, some things/people are just meant to be together like the spoon and fork. There are certain instances when they have to part ways because soup only requires a spoon while pasta only needs a fork but that’s perfectly okay because deep down papa spoon and mama fork know they will be together eventually. This is usually the common theme among light YA romance contemporaries and
The Geography of You and Me is no exception.
Jennifer E. Smith once again managed to make a cliché-ish theme work out just fine because of her beautiful writing and her vivid descriptions making the reader feel and see the places the characters go to. My usual complaint in her stories though is the use of the POV. I feel like the dual POV would have made the story and the characters more relatable. But as it is, it’s a quick, enjoyable and wholesome read fans of YA contemporary romance would still be able to appreciate. -
SPOILER FREE REVIEW:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K6on...
3.75*
This book was basically just what I needed: a mindless, cute, fun romance that was just really easy to read. I see my reading slump coming to an end very very soon. -
"A blackout in New York City brings together two teenagers in Jennifer E. Smith's new romantic YA novel."
Let me tell you one thing, in my opinion Jennifer E. Smith is one of the best YA authors ever (+1 for the fact that she is a nerdfighter). Her books are just awesomesauce and they may not float everyone's boat but hell to the YES they make me feel all fluffy inside so long story short: I CAN'T WAIT TO READ THIS BOOK!
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3.5 stars
Super cute as expected. Jennifer E. Smith has given us another sigh-inducing, feel-good read that leaves you with a smile on your face. I adore these books of hers and each one is like a little escape into a fairy-tale kind of perfect romance story. While The Geography of You and Me may be my least favorite of hers, it's far from a disappointment!
If you're a fan of this author you pretty much know what to expect when you get into one of her books. Her characters are likable, the romance is always swoon-worthy, and they have this fairy-tale quality to it - meaning it's a bit idealistic and sometimes too good to be true, but it's what I love about them. Once in a while, it's fun to escape into this kind of dreamy romance story. The Geography of You and Me, however, is a little different from the others, as in the two love interests are on different continents. They meet in New York and have this incredibly romantic, butterfly-inducing evening, but they both move away shortly after. They stay in touch through postcards which have become a kind of personal joke for both of them, not to mention Owen's aversion to technology. This is super cute at first and full of hope and wonder, but it does lose its spark after a while where things start feeling a little directionless. Told in dual POVs, we see the streets of France and Scotland and London on one side, and a road trip through America on the other. While I can't complain on the settings which were really wonderful and atmospheric, it's the story itself that becomes kind of stale where after a while it consists of nothing more than two teenagers second guessing themselves and full of regret. Being separated for 90% of the book is likely part of the problem here. Even though I knew the premise of the book, I expected it to be a little more passionate and impulsive and a little less… awkward? Less radio silence for sure.
On one side we see a girl experience the world and different cultures, on Owen's side we dive a bit deeper where we see him deal with his mother's death, unsure of how to move on. This gives a little something other than romance to concentrate on, a little something more profound and serious. I also found myself much more compelled to his storyline than Lucy's for the most part, so we'll say Owen was my favorite character in this one. Eventually - and finally!! - the two do meet again and proves to be worth the wait. Statistically, long distance relationships rarely work, but this book makes you want to believe in it for these two. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, is what they say! :)
Overall, The Geography of You and Me is another Jennifer E. Smith book that I would recommend to all you hopeless romantics who want to not only escape, but travel the world with Lucy and Owen.
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An advance copy was provided by the publisher for review.
For more of my reviews, visit my blog at
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Not this time Smith... Not this time.
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2.5 STARS
The point wasn’t the distance. It was the homecoming.
God, I just love that sentiment.
And I truly felt that this had a lot of beautiful moments and heartfelt intentions that just got lost in that thick bog of mediocrity with a droning narrative, a climax-less plot, a pair of charmless protagonists and the non-existent chemistry between them. In yet another exercise in frustration, this wasn’t offensively bad, but the stilted potential just shoves the disappointment obnoxiously THERE. Front and center. In. Your. Face.
Lucy (a favourite heroine name, by the way) is a loner whose globe-trotting parents keeps on leaving her in their New York apartment. Which is okay with her some days, but some days she really just wants to actually go to Paris and not just receive another postcard from them. But then again, she doesn’t really want to impose on her moneyed parents or cramp their style. I don’t understand the rhyme and reason behind this way of thinking, because her parents seem like a fairly reasonable pair, but it kinda made Lucy easy to hate.
Especially when placed alongside Owen, the son of the new super in their posh apartment. Owen and his father recently moved from Philly, running from the memory of his mother’s tragic death. So you’ve got this restless, privileged girl and a heartbroken, blue-collar boy get trapped in an elevator on a citywide power outage.
In the span of a few hours, they forge a friendship out of their shared loneliness, only to be separated by their paternally-driven, employment-related circumstances: hers, whisking her away to London and eventually Edinburgh; his, on a cross-country road trip. They live their lives, meet other people and mark pit-stops in their travels with postcards as they try to carve out a home in their small corners of the world. All the while keeping an unnameable relationship founded on an ephemeral glitch in time and space.
How long could a single night really be expected to last? How far could you stretch such a small collection of minutes? He was just a boy on the roof. She was just a girl in an elevator.
This was told in alternating, third person POVs which I usually don’t appreciate because it often just becomes one scene from two perspectives. In this case, seeing as Owen and Lucy spent the majority of the book apart, it actually worked. It was one of the few things I actually liked about this story, the other being Owen and his father’s relationship. It took a bit of getting used to reading his dad being called “Dad” by the third person narrator (is this being told from an unseen brother’s POV?) but I liked seeing that dynamic between two men trying to hold together what’s left of their family. The quiet portrayal of parental dignity and male pride in Owen’s father was quite heart-wrenching. This was the one aspect in the story where Smith’s subtle hand worked really really well.
Outside of that, this was just a little too monotonous for my tastes.
For me, my problem lay in the groundwork of Owen and Lucy’s relationship. The moments between the elevator and the stargazing in the roof felt crucial to how well this story would hold. Being the point where both these characters would constantly draw memories from once they get separated, I thought it demanded something, some magic and fantasy. But this just refused to stretch beyond the limits of realistic fiction and ended up this side of dull and bland. That brief stretch in the beginning failed to capture my interest for the well-being of either characters. Their chemistry so obscenely non-existent that you just can’t wish for them to find their way back together. Instead I ended up wanting them to remain as distant pen-pals meant to be plot devices to unveil a more interesting progression for either of them.
There was a severe discrepancy between Lucy and Owen’s personal conflicts in that Owen had all the heft and emotional upheaval for two Lifetime Movies while Lucy had none. Seriously, her life is one first world problem after another.
Mom and Dad won’t take me to their trips in Paris and instead leaves me in our New York apartment.
I’m dating a hot, chiseled rugby player with a lovely Scottish accent… but I don’t understand rugby.
This heartache would’ve been solved by a single email to Owen… but postcards are just so much more romantic.
Maybe I missed the point to it all but alternating her chapters walking through the streets of Paris and Rome with her parents, while Owen’s dishwashing in a Mexican restaurant as his dad gets repeatedly rejected for jobs… Is this book even trying to make me LIKE the girl? I had to pause and try to remember anything else about Lucy apart from her non-problems because these were all there was to her character.
For a while I liked how this was quite faithful in the depiction of the struggles in a long distance relationship (a friendship by technicality, rather). But the way the story progressed and even ended, felt a little empty. I like ambiguous endings, those that make you think and fashion your own conclusion but this one felt rather counterproductive. Like jumping from the pan and into the fire where and anyone who has ever suffered through one of those would tell you just what a horrid idea that is.
And maybe what they’ve gone through should inspire some optimism somewhere, some rose-colored hope from the cynical reader,. But from the perspective of someone who has lived that nightmare, the prospect of is just a New Adult trilogy cliche waiting to happen.
And hey, Owen already owns a turtle named Bartleby… all we need is a gay best friend for Lucy and we’re already halfway there.
Review Copy courtesy of the publishers.
Also on Booklikes. -
this book has two of the best YA contemporary romance tropes (spending just one day together + staying in touch by correspondence) and it still manages to be no fun whatsoever.
kinda impressive.
part of a series i'm doing in which i review books i read a long time ago -
Adorable and quite emotional!
The Geography of You and Me is mostly descriptive - it shows snippets of moments suspended in time, it describes deep emotions, and still the author managed to 'show' not simply to 'tell' and I was soon very much in love with the beauty of this story.
There was so much that I loved about it:
- their first meeting, even the one in San Francisco, with the fiasco ending;
- the insights into their lives, their personal struggles with family or friends;
- the cards, so meaningful and cute;
- how they felt about each place they traveled to, about the people they met on the way;
- how they gravitated towards each other no matter what.
And most of all... I liked them them as characters - he was so caring and thoughtful and hurt. He missed so many things in his life. She was so shy and alone, she needed someone to fill the void in her life. They were 2 broken pieces that fit together.
The story is simple. It's not the actual romance that got me badly, but the way they felt about it, about everything. It touched me. It was so emotional it made my heart flutter.
... It was a subtle kind of beauty, still this story was so beautiful it hurt.
Happy midnight reading!
Full review can be found at
ReadingAfterMidnight.com
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Weee! 2014 is going to be a great year!
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4.5⭐️
از اون کتابا که نمیخوای ببندیش و از تموم شدنش ناراحت میشی
از اونا که گردِ حسِ خوب بین ورقههاش پاشیدن و کلماتش دستتو میگیرن دنبال خودشون میکشونن🥺💙☁️
کتابی راجع به پشتبومها و آسمون و سفر و بستنی و بیشترِ چیزایی که عاشقشونم🫂🌚
چقدر خوب شد که خوندمت😌🐳 -
Goodness. With all the fluffiness and cuteness in the world.
It all starts off with a sudden blackout in the city...
Have you ever imagined a city with No electricity, No connections, and Only darkness...
A city only lit by the moon and stars...
The story's realistic and relatable and the story itself is what makes the whole book seems so adorable.
Crossed path of two young people. Blackout. Separation. Travels. Settlement. Meet up of two young people at last.
Song:
See you again
"We've come a long way, from where we began, oh I'll tell you all about it when I see you again."
Fav quote:"There's a difference between loneliness and solitude."
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(This review has been edited to include an addendum, which will hopefully illustrate what I mean by "bad writing").
After reading & falling in love with Laura Kaye's Hearts in Darkness, I jumped at the chance to read another novel about two strangers who are trapped in an elevator in the middle of a citywide blackout. I was hoping that The Geography of You & Me would be a Young Adult (PG-13) version of Hearts in Darkness. Sadly, however, the only similarity between these two novels IS the broken elevator.
To say that I'm disappointed in The Geography of You & Me would be a huge understatement. I never thought that it would be possible to hate a book that starts off in a broken-down elevator, only to take the reader around the world— from NYC to far-away places, such as Tahoe, San Francisco, Seattle, Edinburgh, London, Paris & Rome. So many spectacular cities are featured in this very unspectacular book. The novel had a great premise, but was poorly executed. For most of the novel, the writing is mediocre at best, & the chemistry between the two main characters is virtually nonexistent.
Honestly, there were only two things about this novel that I found noteworthy: 1) The descriptions of life in the Big Apple & the author's realistic portrayal of NYC during a major citywide blackout. 2) The few references to Bartleby the Scrivener. Would I recommend The Geography of You & Me to any of my friends? Absolutely not. Will I be reading this novel again in the future? In the words of Bartleby: "I would prefer not to."
*2/5 stars*
BTW, if you're looking for a good novel by this particular author, then I would wholeheartedly recommend The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight. It's Jennifer E. Smith's best novel, IMO, & the only novel of hers that I would recommend.
Addendum: Here is an excerpt from the novel. These are chapters 29-32 verbatim.
Chapter 29
In school, Lucy sat quietly at her desk, which faced west.
Chapter 30
In between classes, Owen paused for a moment, his toes pointing east.
Chapter 31
In bed that night, Lucy breathed in.
Chapter 32
In the car that afternoon, Owen breathed out. -
3.5/5. This book was exactly what I was expecting. It was a light quick read and it was cute. When I pick up these books I don't really expect them to be life-changing or that meaningful so I hardly ever give them 5 stars. I expect these books to just give me a little bit of enjoyment and I did enjoy this book.
The characters were likeable and I liked the story. I felt the execution was okay. I think Jennifer E. Smith could have done a lot better. There was no insta-love which is always a good thing. I think that Owen & Lucy really did have a connection and I liked how even though they moved away and were with other people, they still thought of each other often. I loved the different POV's.
The writing was okay. Sometimes I thought that Jennifer E. Smith was trying too hard to write something profound and it just didn't work. Her writing didn't grab me and my attention wandered a bit but like I said, her writing was okay. I would recommend this to my friends who like reading this cute fluffy stuff. -
Jennifer E. Smith represents the absolute best in YA writing, and readers will carry this poignant love story in their hearts far after the last sentence is read.
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"His eyes caught hers through the darkness and the elevator felt suddenly smaller than it had been minutes ago."
I am becoming increasingly frustrated with YA contemporaries of late. Ever since the success of
Anna and the French Kiss, there have been an influx of the same cookie-cutter romance, with their own brand of a unique 'twist', but reads more like a sad imitation of
Meg Cabot in her heyday.
The Geography of You and Me falls into the same trap, except it cut more because I was expecting, well, more. This is the same author that wrote
The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, which I haven't read, but heard lots of nice stuff about. So when I saw this book on Netgalley, I was like "Yay! I can finally pop my Jennifer E. Smith cherry!"
Yeah, that feeling dwindled quickly.
Lucy and Owen annoyed the hell out of me. Their whole relationship is based on one night in each other's company after the power goes out in New York, then it's countless pages of dialogue shoehorned as bonding (So. Much. Dialogue. It reads like a fucking script) and, "Oh my God, I can't so thinking about him/her!" It screams the kind of quirky that might work in a chick flick, but here it only comes off as cheesy and unrealistic.
Part of the reason is because it's written in third-person and I felt so apart from the leads, even though it's told in dual POV. Their inside jokes, which we, as the reader, are supposed to be privy to and smile at, feel as irritating as when your friends do it. They chuckle and grin sappily, while we scratch our heads and wonder exactly why a meaningless object (I can't even remember an example. That's how forgettable this is) makes them want to hump like rabbits.
It's not well-written third-person either. It feels as though it should have been written in first-person due to the excess of internal monologue, but the writer, for whatever reason, decided to screw usual YA convention and go for omniscient.
Nor is the writing/dialogue isn't particularly noteworthy. I would describe it as about a step above eyeball-gnawing.
Take this sentence for example. This takes place when Lucy is greeting the people who come to rescue them from the elevator:"'Hi,' Lucy said brightly, greeting them as if this was all very ordinary, as if they always met in this way."
It falls flat, this attempt at dry humor, and only served to infuriate me further because here we have a perfectly good opportunity for chuckles, and the writer just sucked the life out of it and offers me a dessicated husk for compensation.
If it were me, I would've have written this:"'Hi,' Lucy said brightly, as if people dropped in from the ceiling everyday and would you like to stay for tea?"
My verdict is if you're going to use this kind of Rowling-like, whimsical humor, milk it for all it's worth. Don't do it half-assedly.
Fortunately, it does get better around the 50% mark, when less is focused on the sappy world-is slowing-around-me crap and more on Lucy and Owen's respective lives in a foreign land. But a little too late. Once you hit the IDGAF point, there's no going back.
And I zoned out whenever Lucy and Owen would meet in person to try to 'further' their long-distance relationship. Maybe it's because how I personally witnessed the destruction of a long-distance relationship between two of my good friends and have been leery of the concept since then. We don't even hang out as a group anymore. I have to meet up with them individually and furtively, like a cheating wife with two husbands.
But I digress from the main point: I am not on board the Lucy/Owen ship. I fail to see their chemistry and cannot muster up the enthusiasm for them individually because that's the problem with modern contemporary: they're a matching set. It got so whenever they were fighting, I would be like:
Yes, let them break up!
I'd rather they end up with the people they met up with in their respective new homes: charming popular boy, Liam for Lucy and quirky Paisley for Owen. Also, Lucy and Owen
Plus, this elderly couple inspired more feels in me than Lucy and Owen could in 300+ pages:"I snuck off to buy her some perfume," he explained, his eyes swimming. "She's downstairs looking at fabrics. She'll be worried when she can't find me, and her heart..."
[...]
There was a lump in her throat as she watched him fidget with the buttons on his best, and it struck her as the truest form of kindness, the most basic sort of love: to be worried about the one who was worrying about you."
Nameless couple, yes. Lucy and Owen, eh. Good try, but I'm just not your port.
Quotes pulled from an uncorrected galley proof and may be subject to change. ARC obtained from Netgalley.
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O livro podia ter sido muito mais, merecia ser muito mais.
A história é do género young-adult e tem um início muito bom, fazendo-nos de caras ter empatia pelos personagens principais, gostamos tanto deles que queremos saber o que acontece depois da primeira noite.
E depois começam as viagens, até aí tudo bem, mas começam a ser demasiadas viagens tornando-se um pouco cansativo a sua leitura, mas uma pessoa quer saber mais... e aí depois chega o Fim, que para mim após uma jornada literária e geográfica não foi um final suficientemente bom, um desfecho decente.
Acho que um final diferente teria sem dúvida melhorado a história.
É uma história leve, sem grandes dramas, de leitura rápida, capítulos alternados pela perspectiva dele e dela. -
5 Words: Postcards, e-mail, family, moving, travelling.
This was quite a sweet story, and I quite liked it.
But it was quite... Well. How many times have I just used that word?
As lovely as this story was, I don't think it's something that's really gonna stick with me. Sure, it was sweet and enjoyable, but there was nothing truly stand-out about it, nothing that would compel me to read again.
It was something nice to pass the time, but something that I've also quite forgotten by the time I started to write the review a week later. -
The Geography of You and Me was a cute contemporary read. Unfortunately I wasn't too invested in the characters and I've never been the biggest fan of instalove but I thoroughly enjoyed the vivid descriptions of each individual city and country this book travelled to. Having now read a few of Jennifer E. Smith's books, I'd say this was my least favourite when it came to the writing. For me, it didn't flow as smoothly and have the same fun, quick dialogue as the previous books I've read of hers. However, this was a cute read and I'm always all for anything with a stargazing on a New York rooftop scene!
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The story starts with Owen and Lucy stuck in an elevator when the whole city plunges into darkness. It is instant chemistry and once they are rescued they roam around the city and end up chatting for hours. They end up spending their night gazing at stars from their rooftop. As fate intervenes, they both leave New York City soon and part ways.
Owen and his father are trying to get over their loss of their mother and go on a road trip across America. Lucy joins her parents in London who are avid travelers and trots all over the globe. They keep in touch with each other through postcards and email. Do they get to meet each other? Or does the distance change them?
The Geography of You and Me opened with a great promise of an unusual set up but failed to sustain the interest. I am not a big fan of love at first sight (gasp) and the lead characters spent less than a day together to have had time to fall for each other.
I love reading the lovey dovey portion of any romance, as any person would. I was almost looking forward to it just to get out of the monotonous chapters that consisted of ‘he went there’ ‘she went there’. But The Geography of You and Me was a disappointment even on that front.
The story alternates between two POVs but the voice ended up being the same which didn’t work for me at all. I have heard so much of this book and opened it with great expectations and sadly The Geography of You and Me didn’t live upto it.
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هيچوقت دو كتاب از دوتا نويسنده امريكايى رو پشت سر هم نخونيد. :-D . ممكنه بعضو وقتا دلتنگ بشين براى عشق هاى دوره نوجوانى يا دلتون كتابى ميخواد كه اميدوارتون كنه هنوز هم عشق وجود داره، كتاب بدى نبود در كل اما من كلا از رمان هاى امريكايى خسته شدم چون اول اگر بمانم حالا هم اين كتاب. نميدونم چرا كلا ديگه اين ماجراهاى عاشقونه و اينا خيلى بهم كيف نميده ولى برا كسى كه اين موضوعات واينا براش جذابه كتاب دلچسب و قشنگيه.
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3,5
"Sonunda kitap bitirdim." cümlesindeki mutluluk gözyaşlarını bulunuz. -
Om te beginnen: wat een geweldig mooie cover. Prachtig in zijn eenvoud! En dat geldt ook voor het boek. Duizend kilometer tussen jou en mij wordt om en om door de ogen van de beide tieners geschreven. Wat ik zo typisch vind aan dit boek is dat ik eigenlijk niet eens het gevoel heb dat het over zulke jonge mensen gaat. Natuurlijk zijn er de aanwijzingen dat ze jong zijn, maar door de manier van schrijven hadden het ook midden twintigers kunnen zijn. Een zeer volwassen boek, ondanks dat het Young Adult is. Het behandelt kwesties waar je op elke leeftijd mee te maken krijgt, hooguit in een ander jasje. Prachtig, ontroerend, treffend en feelgood boek.
Soms kom je van die boeken tegen waarvan het jammer is dat je laatste pagina omdraait, dan wil je meer en meer en nog meer. Het geeft je een verdrietig gevoel dat je uit de wereld van de personages moet stappen, je zou ze het liefst omarmen en tot leven brengen in je echte wereld. Dat is precies mijn gevoel wanneer ik dit boek dichtsla. Met een zekere weemoed denk ik dan: ‘Kon ik nog maar even verder lezen.’ -
Wat een ontzettend lief verhaal! Maar er waren toch een aantal dingen waar ik niet helemaal tevreden mee was. Zo was het verhaal naar mijn idee echt te voorspelbaar.. En dat vind ik ontzettend jammer. In eerste instantie heb ik dit boek 4 sterren gegeven, maar daarna ging langer nadenken over het verhaal. Daardoor heb ik mijn rating toch nog veranderd naar 3 sterren. Het verhaal was echt niet slecht hoor, maar dit is ook geen boek dat me nog weken bij zal blijven.
Ik vond het begin echt heel erg leuk en daardoor werd ik enorm enthousiast voor dit verhaal. Helaas kakte het verhaal na het begin enorm in. Je leest eerst over Lucy en haar problemen, daarna over de problemen van Owen en dan weer naar Lucy en zo gaat het verhaal verder. Het middenstuk bevatte naar mijn idee te weinig nieuwe dingen en daardoor werd het verhaal saai. Lucy en Owen zijn wel echt leuk en dat maakte het verhaal toch een beetje goed.
Het einde was erg voorspelbaar, zoals ik al eerder noemde. Ondanks de voorspelbaarheid, was het toch wel een schattig einde hoor. Dit was hét perfecte einde voor dit boek en de schrijfster had dat ook niet beter kunnen doen. -
Have you ever finished a book and felt as though not a lot happened during the story? Or have you ever finished a book and felt very underwhelmed by it? Well, that’s how I feel about The Geography of You and Me and, I’m starting to feel as though maybe I’m just not meant to enjoy any of Smith’s work.
The premise of The Geography of You and Me is very cute. It’s about two teenagers – Lucy and Owen – who live in the same apartment complex but they don’t meet until they find themselves stuck inside an elevator together after the electricity is New York City goes out. After that one meeting, they find themselves drawn to one another but it seems as though fate has other ideas when Lucy moves to Edinburgh and Owen goes on the road, moving from place to place so his father can find work. But somehow they manage to keep in touch by short and sweet postcards and soon they find they can’t forget about each other at all.
Like I said the premise of this story is super cute – but that’s probably about it all it has to offer. Lucy’s and Owen’s story forces them to have some form of long distance relationship – if you could call it that – because they’re never really in any kind of relationship. They’re only tied by the postcards they send. They don’t speak on the phone, they very rarely email – due to Owen not liking social media – and when they do finally meet, everything seems to go wrong. Their supposed to have a deep connection with each other but it’s not something we really see right until the very last minute. During the 300+ pages of the story, 200+ pages are just about their normal day to day life and I have to say, I really found the story quite boring just because there is not any real communication between the characters during most part of the story. I was kind of expecting the story to have a swoon-worthy romance and, exciting moments and fantastic quotes with the hope of them getting together, but honestly the whole story was just so flat that it just didn’t work for me. By the end of the story the characters were in a no better place than when they first met each other and, it felt as though I’d read the whole story for nothing – no progress whatsoever.
I have one more book of Smith’s sitting on my shelf and I will give that a try soon, but if that has the same result as her other books I’ve read, I think it’s time to leave this author behind. But I do hope you enjoy this more than me.
Thank you to Headline for giving me the opportunity to review this book in exchange for an honest review. -
Such a fun and cute contemporary! I loved the two main characters, as well as the duo POV's. The travel aspect was one of my favorite things about this book; I really enjoyed getting to read about London, Scotland, Paris, etc.
I think that the story overall was well written and I'm looking forward to reading Jennifer's other novels. :) -
Rating: 3.5
I actually really ended up enjoying this book. It’s a nice fluffy contemporary. -
In the midst of problems: personally, mentally, physically, emotionally and financially, throughout the general pressure and stress of finding my way through those problems and moving on with life, I found The Geography of You and Me on NetGalley. I'd been interested in this book ever since I knew it would exist, going as far as it being my first ever Waiting on Wednesday post, and the moment I saw it, I knew I had to request it; it sounded and looked fantastic, so sitting and waiting, waiting and sitting, I checked NetGalley every hour for 3 days until I was accepted, and let me tell you, the excitement had hit a record high. Without even thinking about it, I downloaded it and waited patiently until I could read it; I read it in 3 and a half hours.
There was instantly something so simple, sweet and adorable about the entire scenario, getting stuck in a lift with someone, and how those few seconds difference could have made the biggest of changes, yet Lucy and Owen were such realistic characters, and they brought this naive and spontaneous nature to themselves that made the story what it was. There's something kind of wonderful about the thought of meeting someone in a lift, and being stuck with them and their company throughout what should have been one of the most scary experiences of somebody's life, and to then share that moment for a whole night, in the middle of a New York City blackout with defrosting ice cream and a sky full of stars, is just magical. Smith managed to make the whole thing so believable and almost like a conscious thought that I was so lost and wrapped up in the whole story from chapter one; I couldn't have asked for anything better.
Smith has produced some great characters in the past with Hadley and Oliver from The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, and I thought I couldn't love another sweet-talking, family guy like Oliver, but Smith surprised me with Owen, and gave me a damaged, yet caring and adventurous young man whom if I was a year younger, I'd have snapped up like a shot. Her characters suffer a lot when it comes to their parents, and sometimes, authors won't venture into deaths and AWOL parents, but Smith doesn't think twice, and really manages to show how much a single accidental death can affect and father and son relationship, and how it can start a spark in a new future for them both, how one single decision can make the difference between going forwards and going backwards. Not only did she give me Owen, but she gave me Lucy too, a girl with big dreams and an even bigger heart, who dreamt of travelling to somewhere out there, specifically Paris, and letting her heart take her to where she needed to be; a brave, charismatic and solitary young girl, and I could really relate to her on an emotional level. Their story, written across the globe in miles and postcards, via lakes and rivers, from the hills of Edinburgh to the seaport of Seattle, right back to New York, to the night they met, for me, couldn't have been more perfect.
There's something about this book that is addictive; I just couldn't put it down. It covered the aspect of growing away from people, moving on with life, taking what live throws at you, living your dreams and how your dreams aren't always what you want in the end. Something about family, the difference between having someone and not having someone, having something, somewhere, a part of you lost everywhere you've been and being happy with it. Owen and Lucy grew so much as people, growing as they learnt from their wrong relationships, growing into themselves and the journeys they took over nine months, growing as they learnt from each others lessons, and growing to meet each other once more. There was something so honest and perfect about this story, something so sweet and lovable, something so amazing about trecking across the world to find that home isn't a place, it's a person, and a feeling, a pull to something better.
This book, to me, is what home feels like. -
Lucy and Owen live in the same apartment building in New York but had never actually met one another until one day they end up in the same elevator when the power goes out. Stuck together the two make conversation and find they like one another. After getting out of the elevator Lucy and Owen spend an amazing night together while waiting out the blackout.
Unfortunately for this pair other circumstances end up splitting them apart as each of their families make plans to leave New York. Getting in touch for a while but each try to jump into their new lives in new cities which leads to a bit of awkwardness between the pair but neither can forget about that one special night they spent together.
I've read a few books by Jennifer E. Smith now and I hate to say this one was my least favorite of the bunch. It's not that the writing was terrible or even the story in particularly but I just never felt that this couple was given enough time together to even be called a couple.
Both young teens in the story it seemed more realistic to me that at least one of them would have just moved on when leaving New York. But even when those chances came about I'm led to believe they have this amazing connection to prevent other relationships I suppose and the pair hadn't even been making use of today's technology and emailing or video chatting or any other means of getting closer.
Overall, 2.5 stars, not really a fan of this one perhaps if events had been a tad differently I would have loved this teen romance but instead felt it lacked the romance.
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