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Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List
Dec. 21st, 2007 10:03 pmRachel Cohn and David Levithan are young adult fiction writing gods. First of all, neither of them has ever written a bad book. And ok, maybe it is just the PMS talking here, but Naomi & Ely's No Kiss List made me cry fat wet buckets. I went through about 5 tissues.
It is not a sad story per se but it is about figuring out that friendship is as complicated as love. That, incidentally, love is a lot more complicated than sex. It is about that stage in life where you get just old enough and just mature enough to let go of the lies that you absolutely needed to tell yourself in order to survive the stuff that came before.
And it is about how scary it is to let go of those lies and how much it hurts to do things that may seem simpler, but cost a lot more emotionally.
It is also funny and well written and full of those little stylistic tricks (like images in the text and playlists as chapters and things) that make a book flow in a certain sort of counter-culture 'zine type way. I liked it a lot but reading it was sort of like getting beat up with a bar of chocolate - sweet and bitter and a bit bruising. (In the best sort of way, but still... I always forget that good books, like good friendships, are just a little bit too strong to be really comfortable around the edges.)
I had my big adolescent friendship like that but the guy wasn't gay and I wasn't nearly as important to his life as Naomi is to Ely's. Actually, I suppose we all have a lot of friendships like that because what it really is is a good friendship, and the point of that part of the story is that friendship is hard. Hard and scary. Its own complicated kind of love. This is the kind of book that makes me wish I was really rich so I could buy 30 of it and mail it to everyone I know.
It is not a sad story per se but it is about figuring out that friendship is as complicated as love. That, incidentally, love is a lot more complicated than sex. It is about that stage in life where you get just old enough and just mature enough to let go of the lies that you absolutely needed to tell yourself in order to survive the stuff that came before.
And it is about how scary it is to let go of those lies and how much it hurts to do things that may seem simpler, but cost a lot more emotionally.
It is also funny and well written and full of those little stylistic tricks (like images in the text and playlists as chapters and things) that make a book flow in a certain sort of counter-culture 'zine type way. I liked it a lot but reading it was sort of like getting beat up with a bar of chocolate - sweet and bitter and a bit bruising. (In the best sort of way, but still... I always forget that good books, like good friendships, are just a little bit too strong to be really comfortable around the edges.)
I had my big adolescent friendship like that but the guy wasn't gay and I wasn't nearly as important to his life as Naomi is to Ely's. Actually, I suppose we all have a lot of friendships like that because what it really is is a good friendship, and the point of that part of the story is that friendship is hard. Hard and scary. Its own complicated kind of love. This is the kind of book that makes me wish I was really rich so I could buy 30 of it and mail it to everyone I know.
