Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Quick Review: Text/Chat/Email by Erin Mallory Long

 It's spring break at one of my two schools, which means that I am tearing through books!  Today I want to highlight a fun, quick read by a friend of mine from high school: Text/Chat/Email by Erin Mallory Long.  (Full disclosure: while I know the author, I bought the book on my own, and I have not been compensated for this review.)

Text/Chat/Email follows 24-year-old Emily as she navigates a romantic crisis: she's living with Brian, the guy she's been dating since high school, but she can't stop thinking about a guy she just met.  And (hello, did you see where I said she's 24?) she does not handle it well.  What I really loved about this book is how messy it is, in a way that often gets smoothed over in books and television.  Sometimes people make bad choices, or weird choices, or just put off making choices, and the results are complicated and unpredictable and confusing.  I also really appreciated the way that Emily's choices in one relationship affect her other relationships; nothing is neatly cordoned off.  Reading Text/Chat/Email is like eavesdropping on someone at Starbucks, crossed with a Taylor Swift album (and let me be clear: those are two of my favorite things.)

Oh, and did I mention it's funny?  Here's one of my favorite lines: "If you were looking at two sides of a coin, Brian would be the really shiny side that looked like hardly any homeless people had put it in their mouths."  I also really enjoyed the interactions (in chat, because DUH, what do people do at their jobs all day?) between Emily and her co-worker Britney.  Emily's deadpan responses to Britney's weird doofiness made me laugh out loud, but I really appreciated that Britney gets fleshed out a little more as the book goes along, so she isn't just a ditzy stereotype.

This book is solidly New Adult material, which means that there is some (totally realistic) language and drinking (obligatory mention since this is usually a YA blog!)  There is not, however, the graphic sex that most articles on NA seem to think define the genre.  This is a character-driven story about taking stock of yourself, owning your choices, and trying to make sense of adult life. 

Edited to add: Here's a link to the Goodreads page!

Saturday, March 15, 2014

A Long Time Ago...We Used To Be Friends

Still here!  I'm just stupid-busy at school (took on an extra, brand-new, never-before-taught-by-me class this trimester with about two weeks notice!  These are the things that keep me on my toes and honestly, I love having the opportunity to dive into new things, but whew--it's a lot of work!) and so not doing much blogging or reading of YA at the moment.

HOWEVER--I have to mark the occasion of the Veronica Mars movie!  Mr. S and I drove all the way up to Waterloo, ON (that's Canada, for those of you not conversant in province abbreviations!) because it wasn't playing in Buffalo.

I won't say anything spoilery, except that I remain Team Piz and pretty much got what I expected from that quarter.  (Also, hello Wallace.  You grew up nice.)  But it was a great time, well worth the wait, and totally sets up a whole new bunch of stories that I hope Rob Thomas will get to tell!