Reviewed by Jo on
Fast forward to the college trip to Paris and things are really hotting up. In between the shopping, the clubbing, the kissing and the making up, something happens between Edie and Dylan that changes both their lives for ever...But do toxic boys like Dylan ever play for keeps? From Amazon UK
Oh, there are no words to describe how much I loved this book! I finished this book yesterday, but I was on too high a buzz to actually form coherent sentences to write the review, so decided to wait until today, but I'm still struggling on how to talk about this book without just repeating "EEEE IT WAS SO GOOD!" in several different ways, and just general unintelligible gushing. But I will try.
I really like the way in which this book was written; there aren't any chapters, it's all diary entries. But these diary entries could be anything from half a page long to several pages long. It
really annoyed me at first, simply because sometimes there were too many breaks after not much being said, and it also left me thinking "just one more chapter" would be pretty hard to judge. But as the story goes on, the diary entries get longer, and become more of what I'd consider an acceptable chapter length, and I actually started to like it! I've read maybe one or two diary-like novels before, but this is the only one where I've actually enjoyed the fact that it was a diary.
Edie was a great character, but she did annoy me a few times. The girl is 16, she's now at college studying her A-levels, so no longer a school girl - yet she seems to have forgotten this. She talks about how "boy shapes" suffer with "boy disease", and I just kept wanting to shake her, and shout "You're not 12!" And a few times she had these angsty, mopey periods over Dylan which I just felt were more the behaviour of a younger teenager, especially when considering all her friends were 19 - surely you would try to act a little more maturer?
I managed to forgive her all that because of Dylan. Who could fail to be all angsty over the gorgeous Dylan? There was so much sexual tension in this novel, you could have cut it with a knife. He's a bit of a bad boy, but not in that he's mean or gets up to no good, just he simply can't make up his mind! He likes Edie, but not enough to to commit to her - yet he can't stay away from her, and always ends up cornering her for a kiss. Talk about mixed signals! The boy wanted to have his cake and eat it, and ohhh, I wanted to slap him so many times! But this is partially why I enjoyed this book so much - it was real. Things like this do happen; girls get angsty, guys can be infuriating, and even though I wanted to slap them both sometimes, when they were together and not arguing, it was just the most sweetest thing!
The other characters in the book were also pretty cool; Nat and Trent, Edie's gay friends, were awesome in that they were always there for her no matter what. They were just lovely! Shona I had trouble working out at first; she was elusive, then she was nice, then she wasn't, then she was. I always thought, until the French trip, that she was up to something. I didn't realise it was actually Mia who wasn't the one to trust. As Edie so nicely puts it, "Mia est une grande vache." (Mia is a big cow). There was one point when even the secondary characters were a little off with Edie, because they thought she went a little far in one argument with Dylan, but I have to say, I was cheering her on so much. Dylan need not have been such a pig at times.
Oh, I really loved this book! It's now official; Sarra Manning is one of my favourite authors. If you haven't read this book yet, you really need to! Now I just have to get my hands on a copy of Kiss and Make Up.
From Once Upon a Bookcase - YA book blog
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 7 March, 2010: Finished reading
- 7 March, 2010: Reviewed