Goodreads Synopsis: How does one talk about love? Do we even have the right words to describe something that can be both utterly mundane and completely transcendent, pulling us out of our everyday lives and making us feel a part of something greater than ourselves? Taking a unique approach to this problem, the nameless narrator has constructed the story of his relationship as a dictionary. Through these short entries, he provides an intimate window into the great events and quotidian trifles of being within a couple, giving us an indelible and deeply moving portrait of love in our time.
My Confession: This little book packs a big punch. It accomplishes in 211 short, small pages what most hefty novels dream of capturing: the reality of a true, nitty-gritty human relationship. Want the truth? It's ugly. Relationships aren't made of rainbows, butterflies, and cotton candy. Sometimes they're slow, boring, stagnant. Levithan's narrator, whose name we never know, discovers the hard way that faithfulness in a relationship isn't a given. His girlfriend cheats on him, and throughout the novel, he grapples with this truth and how he's going to deal with it. Interspersed as he goes over and over her confession in his head, we get glimpses into this relationship. Forget chronology, forget order--we're thrown into important (and sometimes the most un-important) moments in their lives, all classified under specific words found in a dictionary.
Sometimes the entries are longer, taking up a few pages and involving back-and-forth dialogue. Others are shorter, less involved. And somehow it's those that pack the biggest emotional power. Like the entry under the word indelible:
indelible, adj.
That first night, you took your finger and pointed to the top of my head, then traced a line between my eyes, down my nose, over my lips, my chin, my neck, to the center of my chest. It was so surprising, I knew I would never mimic it. That one gesture would be yours forever.
Recommendation: Levithan does a really fantastic job of letting the little things speak for themselves. This story is heavy without becoming overwhelming. It's relatable in its simplicity and normalcy, but the undertones of passion, fear, lust, confusion and pain shine through under almost every entry. I became the narrator myself, his thoughts and emotions clouding my own as I read this. It's a short, quick read that really makes you wonder about your own definition of the word love, a word even this narrator cannot define.
Rating: 4/5
211 pages, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (Jan. 4, 2011)
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