Love story from A-Z

The Lover’s Dictionary

by David Levithan
Series: N/A
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: Januray 4th 2011
Genre: Young adult, romance
Date read: February 14th 2015
My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

“love n.
I’m not even going to try”

On Valentine’s Day, I finished The Lover’s Dictionary by Daniel Levithan. It’s a modern love story, told through a series of dictionary-style entries. We are introduced to this couple who met through a dating site, one of them dhy while the other is quite the opposite. We never learn their names, but their story is unfolded through the short entries and we learn the ups and down through the course of their relationship in a non-chronological way.

[SPOILER ALERT!]

The plot:

Although I think the writing and method of telling the story is straight up brilliant, I didn’t like the book as much as I had hoped. All in all, the book confused me. Initially, I just felt like I wasted my time on a book with a very vague beginning and an open ending. Then, I concluded that this is actually something that would likely happen in real life. So the guy is having all these thoughts that we get to read, and in reality, this is how the brain works. We sit there and think about a certain thing, and before we know it, we’ve ending up thinking about something completely different. In this case, after a big breach in the relationship, he was left with all these memories and events he had with her and I understand how this may lead to an altering between current occurrences and past occurrences . So I guess it’s all up to the reader. I can understand how some people just love this book so much, I just don’t think it applies to me. I just don’t feel it.

All in all:

Recommendation: I personally feel that this book is mediocre although the writing is excpetional. 5 for the dictionary style, but 3.5 for the story itself.

My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

UP NEXT: Paper Towns by John Green

– Ellen