This is the story of a relationship, alphabetically: a dictionary whose entries are vignettes from a couple’s life together. Sometimes an entry is a page or a paragraph or a few pages; sometimes it’s just a line, like:<\/p>\n
autonomy<\/b>, n.<\/em>
\n“I want my books to have their own shelves,” you said, and that’s how I knew it would be okay to live together. (23) <\/p><\/blockquote>\nAs the entries accumulate, you start to get a sense of the couple’s personalities and pasts: both are smart and bookish; he’s shy; she’s more socially at ease; he writes; she drinks. Her dad left her mom; her family life has been difficult; in the past she’s dated the wrong kind of guy. He’s stable, with a steady job and parents who were always supportive of him and are still together and happy. They live in New York City, and it’s the explicitly NYC-ish entries that I found myself loving the most: “ebullient,” about running through the rain down 6th Ave after a concert while everyone else is huddled under an awning; “halcyon,” about a perfect snow-day, going back to bed because everything’s closed; “impromptu,” about summer Friday afternoons that don’t have a plan but turn out delicious, lunch followed by museum-ing or taking the ferry or whatever city-ish things you’ve been meaning to do but haven’t had time for. <\/p>\n
I like, too, how the narrator captures the ups and downs of a relationship, loveliness and doubt and the everyday routines, and I like Levithan’s language, which is sometimes matter-of-fact, sometimes fanciful, sometimes luminous. I like the unexpected bits, like this great image in the entry for “paleontology”: “I sat there as you excavated your boyfriends, laid the bones out on the table for me to see. I shifted them around, tried to reassemble them, if only to see if they bore any resemblance to me” (157). I still like Levithan’s YA work more, maybe because I really love what he does with a more straightforward novelistic form, maybe because the grown-up “issues” of this book (a partner who drinks too much, the question of infidelity) felt a little over-emphasized at times, but still, I’m glad I read this. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is the story of a relationship, alphabetically: a dictionary whose entries are vignettes from a couple’s life together. Sometimes an entry is a page or a paragraph or a few pages; sometimes it’s just a line, like: autonomy, n. “I want my books to have their own shelves,” you said, and that’s how I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}