Dash and Lily's Book of Dares - Review by Sarah Gnefkow

Dash and Lily's Book of Dares

by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

*** and a half stars

Dash and Lily are both teenagers who meet within the bindings of a moleskin notebook. Dash finds this notebook on the shelves in his favorite library during his first Christmas break he is at home alone. Inside there are dares left for him from a girl named Lily. Lily is set up by her brother to do this so she can find a boy who she can spend her Christmas break with while her parents are in Fiji and her grandfather is in Florida. In return, Dash must write dares back to Lily to keep the relationship going. They end up running all over town in New York City following the path each one of them have left for the other. Both Dash and Lily yearn to meet each other but are afraid that their exchanged words have built up more than the other really is, and they are afraid of disappointment. But with each dare comes the need to meet and when they finally due it is definitely not the first impression either of them have expected. They are both pushed to get past what their expectations have built up for the real deal.

I found this book was pretty good. It has some really great parts where I didn't want to put it down, but other parts I felt it was going to go on for hours. This book was written from both Dash's point of view and Lily's alternating chapters. The thing that bothered me the most was definitely at the beginning when it was confusing to understand what was going on. Towards the middle it kind of smoothed everything out though. It wasn't one of those books where I just had to keep reading but it was one that I wanted to find out what was going to happen next. During the last couple of chapters it really showed how the whole book came together with all the random pieces of information it gave me throughout. All in all I think that this would be a good book to check out if you want to read something that's fun and interesting on the side of more important things.