Review ~ The Geography of You and Me by Jennifer E. Smith

eARC received via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Release Date: April 14th 2014

Publisher: Headline

Description:
Lucy and Owen meet somewhere between the tenth and eleventh floors of a New York City apartment building, on an elevator rendered useless by a citywide blackout. After they're rescued, they spend a single night together, wandering the darkened streets and marveling at the rare appearance of stars above Manhattan. But once the power is restored, so is reality. Lucy soon moves to Edinburgh with her parents, while Owen heads out west with his father.

Lucy and Owen's relationship plays out across the globe as they stay in touch through postcards, occasional e-mails, and -- finally -- a reunion in the city where they first met.

A carefully charted map of a long-distance relationship, Jennifer E. Smith's new novel shows that the center of the world isn't necessarily a place. It can be a person, too.

My Opinion

After receiving a copy of The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight a few months ago for review, and really enjoying it, I was excited to try more work by this author so I was excited when I happened to come across it on NetGalley and even more excited when my request got accepted. However, no matter how much I wanted to like this book, I just couldn't and I did struggle to finish it.

Right from the start I had problems. I just couldn't connect with the characters or their situation and I found the story was too jumpy. I never really felt the author developed scenes which in turn led to a lack of emotions, plot and relationships. There just wasn't enough detail for me and it led to me not caring either way about what happened to the characters--even the parts that could have been emotional were either ended abruptly to jump scenes or were just bland with hardly any depth.

I hate saying this as I really like the author's style in the first book I read by her and I had none of these problems. However, by 15% I was already thinking about giving up on The Geography of You and Me. The only thing that kept me reading was the hope of it getting better because I've read the author's previous work. Sadly though, by the time it became obvious it wasn't going to pick up, I had to finish it out of necessity because I had spent so much time on it already--in fact I wish I had given up because the book became even more jumpy and disjointed towards the end. I just felt there was no consistent flow to follow and that the overall plot was lost on mini tangents that to me had no relevance.

I'm not sure what else I can say about this book really as the only word that comes to mind is bland as it drew no emotions from me whatsoever--not even anger or frustration. I just found myself not caring for the characters or the story and I never got into the book; I'm not sure why, it just didn't happen. This won't stop me reading the author's other work, I just hope they are more like The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight.