The Geography of You and Me Hardcover – April 15, 2014

I think it was fitting that I started reading it in the airport, waiting for my flight. Then I read it on the plane and I finished it before going to sleep. And it was such a lovely reading experience and I shouldn't have doubted Jen. I've been hearing some so-so reviews and comments on TGoYaM because apparently, it was "slightly boring". While I do get why some people might have been bored with this book (e.g. third-person perspective, the protagonists weren't even in the same continent most of the time, why are they sending postcards - there's technology, etc.), I still found the book magical with Jen's trademark writing. I will defend this book with the best of my ability!Lucy and Owen met when New York experienced a blackout, leaving them stuck in the elevator. Lucy has been living in the same apartment building all her life and she can be considered an expert in being stuck in the elevator. But never during a blackout. Owen just moved into the basement of Lucy's apartment building, as he's the son of the building's new manager. He feels so out of place in New York City and never imagined he'd be stuck in an elevator so soon.That night, after they were rescued, they share this one-of-a-kind night where there's no electricity all over the city, when ice creams are free and an exodus of people are walking back home. Subways are down, there's no light except for emergency lights and flashlights and the heat suffocating. Two interesting people meet in an interesting situation but when everything goes back to normal, they don't know how to act around each other. Simply, the magic of the blackout was gone. Before they even get to fix what's between them (or might become something between them), they're trajectories are both moving away. Lucy moves to Edinburgh while Owen moves west with his father in search of a stable job. So even before the romance could develop and start, they were chucked out of each other's reach, only communicating via postcards and the occasional email.So why postcards? Is it me but don't you think postcards are sentimental and sweet? Lucy and Owen talked about the banality of postcards but they ended up realizing how postcards actually convey what they want to say to each other. "Wish you were here" when they truly wish the other's with them. Plus, (and Owen explains this) postcards take time to arrive, unlike the email which you receive in just a ping. With their undefined relationship, it just rang true and sensible to me that they'd just send postcards to each other. With email, they might be starting something while they're continents away, which isn't exactly smart. But postcards are casual and to receive one, isn't that so joyous? (I know I love postcards.) In my opinion, them sending postcards, while not conventional, wasn't just a plot device.Then we have those who aren't much fans of this because Lucy and Owen weren't together physically most of the time. While I also wish for more personal physical interaction between the two of them, that isn't the plot of the novel. The novel shows us that a relationship can materialize even if you're halfway across the globe. That even if you have someone near you and you like them, your heart and mind can be thinking and yearning for another person far, far away. That was the sweetest thing for me in this novel. It felt like Lucy and Owen are moving farther and farther away from each other but in reality, their hearts were moving even closer. And their relationship was far from perfect; they were far from perfect themselves. Lucy had a guy in Scotland and Owen had a girl too but when they met again, it was just undeniable that what they had was something different. Then they fought multiple of times but they just couldn't shake each other off their lives. Then they're separated yet again. They definitely have a challenge mapped out in their future and while the odds are stacked against us, it's the kind of romance you just savor. Even if they don't end up together HEA-style in the far future, for me, the peek we got of their intertwining lives and their journey (however impossible it was), was a journey I'll never ever exchange.As with Jen's other novels, Lucy and Owen have their own hang-ups and problems, usually of the familial kind. Owen's mother died and Lucy's pretty much living in her apartment alone. They have different backgrounds and as they travel and share postcards to each other, they also share a bit of themselves every time. They reveal what they feel, their problems and what things they wish for.I find third-person perspective hard to get into but even with just the first page of TGoYaM, I sighed with relief because I just love Jen's writing. It sounds playful, with some hidden comic and light tones, but simply written. Yet, when you read it, it's just different. I hate using the word magical but I just can't think of a word that encapsulates what I feel when I read her novels. It takes me into a different place, that's for sure. It feels wistful, like I'm in a different world where I'd rather be stuck in an elevator during a blackout. It's just, you have to read it for yourself.Jennifer E. Smith cements her place in the contemporary YA landscape with THE GEOGRAPHY OF YOU AND ME, yet another solid novel on her belt. The Geography of You and Me will take you to London, Paris, Scotland, California, Michigan and everywhere else, grabbing your heart without you knowing it. At the end of it, you'll feel the urge to travel, live and love. Such a great read.

Jennifer E. Smith has a knack for writing super cute contemporary romances. Sometimes they are excellent, and sometimes they are just merely adorable. Which isn’t a bad thing at all, obviously. I love adorable things always. But when you know an author is capable of excellent, like I know Jennifer E. Smith is (I’m talking about Stat Prob), adorable somehow seems like a letdown. Sad face. The good news is, adorable is what THE GEOGRAPHY OF YOU AND ME is, and I enjoyed it just fine.So this story begins with a blackout, and two kids getting stuck in an elevator together. One of them, Lucy, comes from a super wealthy family who lives on one of the NYC apartment building’s top floors. Her older brothers are off at college and her parents are those rich, continental, “we travel all the time and leave our kid by herself” couples. Owen, on the other hand, lives with his father in the basement, an apartment pity-given to them so that Owen’s dad could get work as the building’s super following his wife’s death. When the two teens are trapped in the elevator together, they wind up spending the whole afternoon and night together. Not like THAT, though. Just talking and maybe feeling some things and looking at the stars and it’s lovely. But in the morning, they go back to their own lives and wind up leaving the building where they had their little meet-cute pretty much right away for various reasons. They spend the next few years moving around and keeping in touch sporadically, but even though they are each in new places and experiencing new things, they can never seem to forget that blackout.So first things first: THE GEOGRAPHY OF YOU AND ME is sweet. Lucy and Owen are sweet together, for all that they only really spend a few hours together at first. They have this instant sense of “You are someone I’d like to spend time with,” but in a really lovely way. Their connection is tentative but touching. It’s obvious (or it was the way I read it) that they feel like they can have a connection beyond just the few hours they spend in the elevator, and later, on the roof of their building, stargazing. The sense of promise that hangs around them makes it that much more bittersweet when Lucy moves to Edinburgh with her parents and Owen sets off on a road trip with his grieving dad, and any opportunity for their little sprout of a maybe-relationship is squashed.But they manage to keep in touch through really fun little notes. I loved that they did things old school and sent REAL MAIL. I just thought that was endlessly charming. I love real mail. It’s so much more personal and intimate. And I loved that Owen and Lucy were sending each other these little one-liner postcards, basically just to say, “Hey. Thought of you today.” Like I said: ADORABLE.I appreciated the reality of their situation, though. They were never really together in any formal sense at all, so when Lucy moves to Edinburgh and meets a cute boy, it felt real that she would have feelings for him. And when Owen meets a girl out west when he and his father have settled down in Portland, it was bittersweet but real that whatever feelings he had for Lucy had tempered to a point where he wanted to be with someone else. I liked that Jennifer E. Smith didn’t make it so that they were pining away for one another hard from thousands of miles away after just a short time together.And one thing that Jennifer E. Smith never shorts her characters on is other issues. Relationships are never the only things going on in her books, and Lucy and Owen are certainly no exception. Lucy is struggling as always to find a place to fit in. She doesn’t really have many friends at school and gets lost in her family, when she even sees them. Her absentee parents are not bad people, but it would be hard for someone not to take that kind of abandonment personally eventually. And Owen is coping with the death of his beloved mother while trying to keep his dad from letting his own grief drag him under. I liked their relationship. It’s not very often that we see father-son relationships in YA–or not, at least, in the books I read–so it was nice to see in THE GEOGRAPHY OF YOU AND ME.So what’s the deal, then? I don’t think I’ve said one bad thing about this book. Why wasn’t I blown away with THE GEOGRAPHY OF YOU AND ME? It’s hard to say. I think my expectations were high because I still remember reading Stat Prob and legit crying over Hadley and her relationship with her dad. There were emotions there that were missing for me from THE GEOGRAPHY OF YOU AND ME, and so even though I liked it a lot and had warm fuzzies all over the place, it still didn’t meet the bar I have set for Jennifer E. Smith’s books. The double-edged sword of writing a book that gets to readers, I guess.Still, if you like Jennifer E. Smith’s books like I do, then THE GEOGRAPHY OF YOU AND ME is one you should read. Lucy and Owen are adorable but not perfect, so that’s always a bonus. And the family issues they are dealing with are real but not melodramatic, I didn’t think, so that’s always good, too. PLUS! Travel! Road trips! Scotland! I approve! And I very much enjoyed how Lucy and Owen made such an impression on each other that, despite miles and years, they still thought of one another.

O livro é muito bem escrito, mas a história discorre de forma lenta. Para quem espera um romance para passar o tempo, é ótimo; mas para quem espera aventura, pode passar o livro todo buscando um clímax quase que inexistente. Muito bom para expandir o vocabulário na língua inglesa.

I wanted so desperately to love this book. I really didn’t enjoy her first  book  that I read, and then the  second  and  novella  were better. This one I’m kind of on the fence with - I didn’t love it, but it wasn’t a book I hated. Just wanted to throw it at a wall every few chapters.The author knows how to write really irritating teenage characters. There were points that I was wanting to reach into the book and bang Lucy and Owen’s heads together, so they could sort it out and realise how immature and bratty they were being.The book would flow so much easier if it wasn’t for the author finding a little quirk that she simply had to add in continuously, until she has thoroughly sickened the reader. How often did a chapter start with:“In ____ (close your eyes, and let your finger land on a map, insert place/town here), Lucy/Owen ____ (insert random adjective here.)”I was screaming with all the pent up frustration that I’m carrying around with me at the moment. I can see why she did it, as they were mostly doing the same thing, at opposite ends of the world (slight exaggeration), thinking about each other. But a run of chapters, starting off the exact same way, was really annoying. I suppose it grounded you where that particular character was at the beginning of that particular chapter.Chapters 25-34 were the most frustrating though. They were often no more than a line or two, with blank pages on either side. The author’s trying to insert an inevitable pause before the murderer is revealed but it REALLY doesn’t work in books, as it just made me turn the pages even faster.And the amount of walking that Owen and Lucy do is unreal. Pages of them pounding streets/stairs in whatever town they were currently in, thinking about the other, thinking about what they wanted to say - Tolkien has a lot to answer for!What did I like about this book? I could see it in my head. Smell what the characters were smelling. I got butterflies in my stomach each time a postcard arrived. I enjoyed seeing the city that I’ve spent most of my adult life working in through another person’s eyes - I really must walk up Arthur’s Seat one of these days. I can see this being a movie - split screens, while Owen and Lucy stare into the far off distance and violins wail, building to a crescendo.While there are quite a few irritating quirks about this book, there is a certain magical quality to it, but for me, the annoyances tipped the scale slightly. I will be wary about picking any more up by this author, unless the blurb really reels me in. booksecondnovella

I've read three of Jennifer E. Smiths previous books (You Are Here, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, and This is What Happy Looks Like) and I've absolutely loved all of them. So when I heard about this book, I was ridiculously excited for it. I couldn't wait for it to come out, and once I got my hands on a copy, I was excited to read it.I was not disappointed. Once again Jennifer E. Smith has created a story, that you can't help but smile about as you read it.I'll admit, I'm not a huge fan if the insta-love kind of thing, but Jennifer E. Smith just makes it work, and I loved reading about the instant connection between Owen and Lucy in this book.I also loved that it was written in dual perspectives. I even loved that it was third person, because despite normally being a bigger fan of first person, I felt that for this story, it worked really nicely having it done in third.The two main characters of this story were great, and I liked that they had their own back stories and progressing story lines, which were separate to the love story.I loved the travel aspects as well. Dotting about from place to place and yet always thinking of that one night that they met. It was fantastically written.This book is full of wonderful moments, paced out fantastically and it's definitely one of the best books I've read this year.

I have given this book two stars as I didn't like the writing style or the main plot of the story. I think this book is either for someone who wants a Summer read or for someone who just wants something a little different. I found the characters went on and on about thoughts and memories they were either sending to each other or just thinking about.I found Lucy's character to be quite slow and she did get on my nerves for a lot of the story, I think this was due to the pace of the book. Owen's character on the other hand was great! Just not in this story, Owen was a fast paced character who knew what he wanted and where is heart was which isn't what I could say about Lucy.The plot was okay, quite weak I must say and I do think though the author had spent a lot of time doing research for this book but unfortunately it didn't come together for me.Do I recommend it? Who would I be to say? If you want a easy read, this maybe for you or if you want something to give you some comfort on the weekend this maybe for you. For me I wouldn't go out of my way to re-read this.

I am a big fan of Jennifer E. Smith, have read all her books. I did not like her previous book as much as I thought I would but knew I'd read this book anyway. Glad I did. I loved this book. I loved the relationship between Lucy and Owen, who are great likeable characters. Really sweet love story.