I mentioned in my April round up that I was almost finished with this (thus counting it in April), so tonight I finished the last small bit and am ready for my mini-review. This is a YA title which my girls enjoyed and which they encouraged me to read (plus we've seen the film, which is a pretty good adaptation, perhaps due to the author himself adapting it).
But as for the book, I'd say it's almost a very good book - the story is good, the characters interesting and it's not too predictable, even if one has an idea where the overall arc of the story is going. The main thing for me was that the voice didn't always feel genuine. I think this is a hard thing to achieve anyway, and in an epistolary novel, where the narrator is for all intents and purposes talking directly to the reader (especially one like this where the letters are all one-sided - more like a journal) it's hard to remove the omniscience of the narrator from the narration without it feeling just a little forced at times. In places, it felt a bit disingenous, though it got better toward the end. I did like it considerably better than Catcher in the Rye, a novel which it refers to both explicity and implicity, and for which I am in the Strong Dislike camp. However, minor quibble, really and if I'd read it as a teen - the target audience after all - I doubt I'd have noticed.
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