Book Review: The Geography Of You And Me by Jennifer E. Smith

In Space, I scream.

Owen lives in the basement. Lucy lives on the 24th floor. But when the power goes out in the midst of a New York heatwave, they find themselves together for the first time: stuck in a lift between the 10th and 11th floors. As they await help, they start talking...

The brief time they spend together leaves a mark. And as their lives take them to Edinburgh and San Francisco, to Prague and to Portland they can't shake the memory of the time they shared. Postcards cross the globe when they themselves can't, as Owen and Lucy experience the joy - and pain - of first love.

And as they make their separate journeys in search of home, they discover that sometimes it is a person rather than a place that anchors you most in the world.

This is your typical chance meeting romance, except the two main characters have wanderlust and use international mail.

The characters are well developed, even the parents. Everyone is a real person even characters that only appear for one paragraph. The romance has a nice growth to it, in the sense that Lucy and Owen don’t declare their undying love for each other by the time they escape the elevator and takes place over a year.

A lot of traveling in this book, one character roaming the states whiles the other mostly roams British capital cities as while as other interesting places in Europe.

Something that bugged me about this book that it’s stated that Edinburgh smells of Stew, when it doesn’t. Are these the lies the English are spreading about us? Lucy’s mum is English by the way and she says this first. Lucy also calls her mother mom, which frankly as a British person I would not let my kid away with that. Then again maybe most people don’t share my fondness of the vowel ‘u’. I know Americans don’t.

This book is separated into five (or 6) parts. Part III, Everywhere, has an interesting format of the opening sentences of the chapters: In someplace, character did something e.g. In London, Lucy cried.

The last few chapters are annoyingly short for no reason. Especially, considering I read it on Epub that’s meant to printed out really. It has the nice page image instead a blank page at odd number chapter; there are these wiggly vertical lines. I like this but my e-reader didn’t or really did because it took forever to get past these pages. My point being that might contribute to my dislike of those chapters being that short.

Overall, I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars for literature named turtles. It was a nice little romance, with travelling to exciting locations. I'm sure that ticks the boxes for a lot of people.

I got this off Netgalley for a review. It’s being published by Headline on 10^th April 2014.