Review: The Geography of You and Me by Jennifer E Smith

Lucy and Owen meet somewhere between the tenth and eleventh floors of a New York City apartment building, on an elevator rendered useless by a citywide blackout. After they're rescued, they spend a single night together, wandering the darkened streets and marveling at the rare appearance of stars above Manhattan. But once the power is restored, so is reality. Lucy soon moves to Edinburgh with her parents, while Owen heads out west with his father.

Lucy and Owen's relationship plays out across the globe as they stay in touch through postcards, occasional e-mails, and -- finally -- a reunion in the city where they first met.

A carefully charted map of a long-distance relationship, Jennifer E. Smith's new novel shows that the center of the world isn't necessarily a place. It can be a person, too.

Review: this was one of those books that had a lot of hype around it, on twitter and YouTube people are very excited about reading this book. Sometimes this means that all the hype is true and it's an awesome book, sometimes though it means you listen to all the hype and then the book lets you down. Unfortunately, this book fell into the latter category for me. I think it was so over hyped, I had such high expectations and I was let down a little bit really. 

The storyline was a good concept, two people who try their hardest to keep their link strong after meeting each other despite being a opposite ends of the country or the globe. They have a unique way of communicating, mainly through postcard-an idea which I loved! However, I really didn't feel like anything happened, someone moved, they wrote to each other, someone else moved, they wrote to each other. I just didn't think it was as well-developed as it could have been. The characters were alright, again I think that their development was rather stunted. There was a lot of potential for them to have their back stories explained a little further, or for them to achieve things whilst they were on their own but I felt that nothing really happened for either of these characters. 

What kept me reading was the writing, it was gorgeous writing with the most beautiful similes and metaphors. This seemed like what this author is known for an I really did enjoy the writing and the structure of this novel, but the overall effect just wasn't enough to redeem the whole book for me unfortunately. I don't feel it was reading time wasted but I did feel a little disappointed with the latest novel from this author.