Music and Dancing

BlogHer paid me to read this book and write a review. The words and thoughts are my own, as if you couldn't tell.

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I read Gayle Forman's Where She Went for BlogHer and found it . . . meh.  

I have a teenager, I've read a lot of YA, a lot of it engaging, some of it sublime, and this book was . . . blergh. 

I don't know.  I couldn't get involved in the characters [Adam, the rock star, and Mia, the cellist] or the situation [they spend one night together remembering their past - which is a trope that’s kind of Before Sunrise-adjacent, which may explain my antipathy, because I fucking hate Ethan Hawke's scraggly ass] or the prose that seems overwrought [so much meaning and depth and music as an allegory/metaphor/ohmygodjuststop].

It seemed like a good idea – two people reconnecting after a years apart, rehashing and reliving and reassessing.  There’s THE ACCIDENT and THEIR FEELINGS and . . . yadda yadda yadda.  It just seems . . . I don’t know . . . uninviting.  There’s no toehold, no pull for me in this book.

Obviously, others find it – and its prequel, If I Stay – so well done that the previous book was a NYTimes bestseller, but I can’t get into it.  I have little patience for overwhelming sentimentality [can you believe it?] and so something has to be super well-written and addictively engaging for me to want to read it.

This wasn’t it.