Dash and Lily's Book of Dares
11. Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares
Dash is a not-quite-typical teenage guy whose divorced parents have left him on his own for Christmas. Far from being depressed, Dash is glad to escape the madness of the holiday season and spend some time alone. The week before Christmas, he’s browsing a used bookstore when he comes across a red moleskine notebook with a cryptic message inside. The notebook sends Dash on a scavenger hunt through the bookstore and invites him to correspond with the owner of the notebook, a teenage girl named Lily. Like Dash, Lily is essentially alone for the holidays, but, unlike him, she’s devastated that she can’t spend Christmas with her family. As Dash and Lily trade dares with each other through the notebook (see a dumb Christmas movie! Sit on Santa’s lap!), they also forge an unlikely friendship. But when the time comes for them to meet in real life, will their expectations spoil the reality?
After all the depressing books I’ve been reading for school, this light YA fare - written by the folks who wrote Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist - is just what I needed! The teens in this book are impossibly clever and hip, and while I didn’t find them entirely realistic, it was fun to read their snappy dialogue and immerse myself in their improbable lives. The book is told by Dash and Lily in alternating chapters, and Dash’s sections were by far my favorites. Lily is interesting, but she also seems to be a bit, well, crazy. Her “OMG Christmas *bouncebounce*” attitude gets old pretty quickly. Nevertheless, this was a fun book to read, and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes clever YA lit.