Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan

The Story: Nick sees his ex-girlfriend (who he is still pretty much in love with) in a bar with another guy and impulsively asks the girl closest to him to be his girlfriend for five minutes to show his ex-girlfriend that he’s over her (even though e’s clearly not). That girl is Norah.  She is a bit impulsive herself and reaches up and gives Nick a fireworks-kiss.  From there, this kind of crazy night ensues.  They connect at first, then kind of fall apart… then connect again… and fall apart again. All of this happens quite a few times before dawn. They live in NYC, so we’re also watching them kind of wonder to all these different places: a club, a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, a couple taxis, a hotel (just the little room with the ice machine… hmmm…), and Times Square.  As they progress through this date, they are really  just feeling each other out and letting go of the exes that they have both been toting around for some time.

What I Thought: I had never heard of this before I saw the movie preview. I’m pretty serious about reading the book before I see the movie and I wanted to see this movie eventually so when I saw this book at the library, I grabbed it for a quick read.  I have to admit, though, that I couldn’t picture Nick & Norah as anyone other than the kids that play them in the movie. Dang. I hate when that happens.

Anyway. I think I read this book in just a couple of hours. Maybe not even that. It is super short and written in a way that is just easy to fly through.  I think that, for me, that added to the enjoyment of the book. They are kind of carrying on at this frantic pace during the whole night and I felt like I was reading it just as frantically.  I wasn’t totally sold on the characters- they just seemed totally contrived- but for me, they took a background to a fun teenage love story. I liked the idea of them just meeting accidentally and taking a chance on each other.  I liked how they kind of hopped from spot to spot and in their first night together got to see a dozen sides of each other.

I even thought that the back-and-forth narration was great, and a lot of times I feel like that is a totally ineffective way to tell a story. I think that what made it work in this case was David writing Nick’s parts and Rachel writing Norah’s.  They both brought the big guns and I can just imagine how much fun they had bouncing ideas off of each other. Fun, fun, fun.

I also like the idea that there is YA out there now that is a little more relevant than when I was in high school.  These kids drink and cuss and mess around and I feel like it’s pretty important that that’s out there for teens to read.  There was nothing over-the-top here, just normal teenage stuff. I can see some teachers or parents getting kind of bent out of shape about this, but I think that it is a place for teens to kind of “live this out” in a safe way, if that makes sense.

Conclusion: All in all, a cute, fun read.  I don’t think that my world was changed and I don’t think that I’ll read it again, but I will surely rent the movie and keep an eye out for other books by these authors.  I was on a mini-vacation when I read this and it was just perfect for that.  Give it a go.