I have been a huge fan of Jennifer E Smith for YEARS! “The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight” is one of my favorite books and I couldn’t even stand how cute “This is What Happy Looks Like” was! I absolutely love her style.
All of her YA romances happen in the most improbable ways.. falling in love on a plane ride.. Meeting a celebrity accidentally over email and falling in love… falling in love with a girl who has the same name as your ex girlfriend on a cross country train ride.. it wouldn’t happen but it does in her novels in the best way possible! They never feel too cheesy to me, there is just enough realism to make it work!
Field Notes on Love was another book in this style. It is a YA book, following a English boy named Hugo right after he has finished high school. His girlfriend Margaret Campbell is going to college somewhere else and so they break up, but not before she leaves him tickets for a train trip across the United States, convienctly booked in her name. So he uses the internet to find another Margaret Campbell, also just finishing high school, to go on the trip to discover who he is outside of being a sextuplet. It so happens this new Margaret Campbell is a filmmaker who got rejected from film school and is ~devastated~ when she is told her work was impersonal.
This cross country train trip turns into a way for her to film a new documentary, seeing all different kinds of love, while falling in love herself. It’s bittersweet, it’s adorable, it’s sad as they experience losses, it’s a five star book to me!
My six word review:
Everything a YA romance should be
