Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Stephanie Perkins is amazing. Her characters are better developed than I am as a living human being, and the way she traverses her settings makes you feel like you’ve known the place your whole life.
I read Anna and the French Kiss two and half times consequtively when it first came out, and I don’t like romance centered fiction! SHE’S THAT GOOD.
Lola and the Boy Next Door is wonderful, though not quite as good as her debut, but the elements of teenager-hood and heartbreak and romance are all there, in such a realistic way it’s astounding they read like fiction. The character of Cricket Bell didn’t intrigue me the same way Etienne St. Clair did in A&tFK (truthfully I was more into Max, woof) but I will rave about Stephanie Perkins anyway. She can do whatever the hell she wants and I will eat that shit up because she holds the key to the pathetic, sappy, forever-sixteen-year-old inside of me.
Okay now I’m kind of mind-boggled by how long it’s been since I was sixteen.