The Sun Is Also a Star

It took two chapters for me to decide I hated the format of this book. It took three more for me to change my mind and decide that the book's format is brilliant; I may have liked it more than I liked the story. If you don't like instalove stories, you won't like this. Your eyes will roll too much and you will give yourself a headache. I hail from Bollywood, the land of instalove, so I didn't mind it here. It's been a while since I first watched Before Sunrise (Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy), but it felt like that type of movie in book form: strangers meet, engage in altogether too meaningful dialogue entirely too quickly, fall in love.

I have a soft spot for stories set in NYC. A Queens boi myself, I could relate to Flushing boy taking the Garlic Express (7 train) into Manhattan.

My only real problem with this story is that Daniel and Natasha didn't feel like kids. It felt like kid things were thrown into the story to make me believe that they're kids and not young adults in their mid- to late twenties. Kid things like high school references, pre-college stressors, etc. But their feelings and their articulation of those feelings and their analysis of and conclusions about their lives and the world around them just felt way older. That's not to say that I wanted them to be less perceptive and their dialogue less mature; rather, I wanted them to just be the ages they sounded.

Nothing earth-shattering, here, but this is a sweet, quick, enjoyable read.