Thank you so much to everyone who voted in my poll to Choose My Next Book, those are truly some of my favorite posts to write and I love seeing what gets votes, almost always the answer surprises me!
The winner was THE SPECTACULAR NOW by Tim Tharp. Here is the synopsis from its Goodreads page:
SUTTER KEELY. HE’S the guy you want at your party. He’ll get everyone dancing. He’ ll get everyone in your parents’ pool. Okay, so he’s not exactly a shining academic star. He has no plans for college and will probably end up folding men’s shirts for a living. But there are plenty of ladies in town, and with the help of Dean Martin and Seagram’s V.O., life’s pretty fabuloso, actually.
Until the morning he wakes up on a random front lawn, and he meets Aimee. Aimee’s clueless. Aimee is a social disaster. Aimee needs help, and it’s up to the Sutterman to show Aimee a splendiferous time and then let her go forth and prosper. But Aimee’s not like other girls, and before long he’s in way over his head. For the first time in his life, he has the power to make a difference in someone else’s life—or ruin it forever.
So this book did some things for me and didn’t do some things for me. I know that’s vague but it’s the best way I know to describe it.
This book had this weird hybrid of being both too predictable in certain areas and then the ending being so abrupt and unresolved that the direction I assumed it was going from its predictable nature wasn’t the ending I got. And I’m not sure if I liked that or not. On the one hand, it kind of cuts out my argument of being predictable. On the other hand, it wasn’t a very satisfying ending so does it really help anything? No.
My problems with the story are kind of nit-picky but at the same time pretty central to the entire book. The book simply had that trope of cool-guy-meets-nerdy-girl-and-falls-for-her. And it was written well enough but it still felt like a story I’d read before. I did like that it was written from a male’s perspective. Not only do I like seeing this is the Young Adult genre but I thought it was good to see a popular guy falling for a geeky girl from the guy’s way of thinking, the way he falls for her was great. Unlike in Twilight and similar stories where it’s the girl doing all the fawning and thinking “Oh, he could never fall for me” it was the guy seeing her and thinking “She’s interesting and not like everyone else, I want to explore this.”
There was a great stand out quote:
“Aimee says the themes are simple: Goodbye individuality, goodbye uniqueness. The uniform, soulless future is coming and the seeds have already been planted. She’s read or watched about a billion similar stories. That’s what people fear, she says, because they think it’s like death and that death is the ultimate robber of identity. “Do you think that’s what death’s really like?” I ask. “No,” she says. “I think, when we die, we don’t lose our identity, we gain a much, much bigger one. As big as the universe.”
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I LOVED THAT QUOTE. That is some great writing. But it wasn’t enough to rescue the entire story for me. I would give this one three out of five stars but I’m still very much looking forward to watching the movie (which I saw was available on Amazon Prime!) because, hello, Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley!
Did you read this book or see the movie? What did you think?
