It's hard for me to discuss this book because it's difficult to describe what exactly I liked about it. I did really enjoy it, but so many of the things I have to say sound negative.

First of all, nothing happened, basically. A lot of things happened, but I thought the book was going to be about the relationship between Arthur Opp and Kel Keller, based on the synopsis. They never meet. The book is about their relationship in a way, but it's more of a preamble to their relationship. In any other book, this would have been the first fifty pages of introduction before the real story started.

But I liked that. I love a slow character driven book. Honestly, I'm not even sure I could call this character driven because that implies there's something other than characters going on, which there really wasn't. It was just about the characters, how they were growing, how they were coping, how they were failing. I liked them for their flaws and their crappy behavior and their insecurities, as well as for their strength.

I found myself growing attached to the characters, even when I didn't like them. I was not a fan of Arthur as a person, but his sections were my favorite to read. He was compelling and interesting and I found myself rooting for him despite myself. Kel I liked as well, although his half of the book was a little lesser to me. I just found Arthur's situation a little more interesting, despite the fact that Kel had most of the drama.

There's often a sense of melodrama in books, things that unfold quite too neatly and people who get into the perfect arguments to push the story along. As much as I enjoy reading that, there's always the knowledge that it would never happen that way in real life. But this book felt like real life. The decisions people made in this book actually made sense, and sometimes they led away from the drama. They'd sit down and have a casual conversation about their options instead of continuing to hide their feelings and have communication problems for the rest of the book. It was refreshing, but at times it also seemed like the book wasn't building to anything. But I kind of liked that too.

One thing that did really irritate me in this book was Moore's use of an ampersand instead of writing out 'and' for Arthur's chapters. I don't know why. It wasn't consistent, it wasn't used in letters, it just felt random and pointless and really irritated me. I understand making formatting changes like that sometimes, but it didn't seem to do anything here.

There were also times where it felt like Arthur and Kel had the same speaking style, which was strange since one was a 60 year old former professor with British parents and one was a teenager who grew up in Yonkers. They shouldn't have sounded as similar as they did and sometimes that did make me like this book a little less.

I also wasn't always fond of the writing style itself. First person present tense is rarely my favorite and seemed to alternate a bit between past and present. At times it did feel stilted and like the sentences were too choppy, but I'm just not a fan of that style in general.

Overall though, I did really enjoy this book. I wasn't sure I would, but the longer I read it, the more invested I got. I ended the book really caring about the characters and the resolution. I'm not sure this is one I'd recommend to everyone, but I do think it's worth a read if it sounds like your thing. I'm very excited to read more from Liz Moore.