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This is a collaborative book written by two authors who have had individual success in the Young Adult market.
Arthur and Ben meet cute at a post office when Arthur follows a cute guy who is trying to mail a package to his ex-boyfriend. They don’t exchange information before they are separated by a flash mob and then spend a third of the story thinking about how to find the other, and if it is even worth the attempt.
Arthur is a junior in high school in an Atlanta suburb. He is in New York City for the summer as his mom works in a law office there for a few months. Ben is also a junior, a New Yorker who doesn’t see the city in the same awed way that Arthur does.
The two finally get together and have several false starts to their romance. Which leaves them with only a couple of weeks left together before their regular lives resume and they are separated by a thousand miles or so.
This was a cute book, but I think suffered rather than benefited from having two authors. It seems that each author took one character to write, and the chapters are alternating perspectives from the boys’ points-of-view, but it makes for a fair amount of redundancy and a lot of pages spent with angst-y ‘what if he doesn’t really like me’ from opposing views. And then, once they have figured it out, there is a super-speed to their relationship from not-quite-my-type-but-I-guess-I’ll-date-him to dinner with parents to sex. I’m not a gay teenage boy, but that seems like a lot to try to handle within two weeks. I think a heavier hand in editing would have helped.
And then there is the ending. I’ve read reviews on other sites that really hated the ending. I thought it was more true-to-life than anything in the preceding pages.