Title: You Know Me Well
Authors: David Levithan and Nina LaCour
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Publish Date: June 7th 2016
Genre: YA
Rating: 4 Stars
“Who knows you well? Your best friend? Your boyfriend or girlfriend? A stranger you meet on a crazy night? No one, really?
Mark and Kate have sat next to each other for an entire year, but have never spoken. For whatever reason, their paths outside of class have never crossed.
That is until Kate spots Mark miles away from home, out in the city for a wild, unexpected night. Kate is lost, having just run away from a chance to finally meet the girl she has been in love with from afar. Mark, meanwhile, is in love with his best friend Ryan, who may or may not feel the same way.
When Kate and Mark meet up, little do they know how important they will become to each other — and how, in a very short time, they will know each other better than any of the people who are supposed to know them more.”
(I received a digital copy of this book in return for an honest review)
There was something about this book that made me lose control. I picked it up, flicked to the first page and commenced a reading frenzy. And, especially considering that this wasn’t even a long book, I ended up finishing this in an afternoon. If I had to sum up the overall feel this book had, I’d happily describe it as one of those warming summer reads that every teen ends up reading over the holiday. Also, it immediately gets huge thumbs up because it’s LGBT that is actually written well! Yay!
“We are all on the way to the same party even if it’s taking place in hundreds of different bars and living rooms. We are going out to celebrate ourselves and one another. To fall in love or to remind ourselves of people we’ve loved in the past.”
I am a huge fan of having different POV’s throughout a book because really, what’s better than having one point of view apart hearing from multiple characters? Nothing. And when it is different authors doing the different POV’s? Even better. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason I liked Levithan and Green’s ‘Will Grayson, Will Grayson’ so much too – you can always count on having the different voices sounding completely different. In ‘You Know Me Well’, you can definitely feel the difference’s between voices, albeit a few similarities, which really made the whole reading experience so enjoyable.
“Taylor is a boy, and you are my best friend. Taylor is a date, and you are my calender.”
Another massive pull to this book was how lyrical the writing is. I think I could have literally highlighted the whole book with quotes that I wanted to share it was that poetic. Every line was somehow perfectly structured to give it a shimmering coat of beauty – it was melodic, rhythmic and tuneful. And, to be honest, there is not other way to make me love a book than to make each word roll off the tongue like music.
I also related to the ending a lot. Kate found herself really worrying about the future and couldn’t find herself feeling ready for all these massive things about to take place. As a teen/young adult, it is so likely that the readers of this book, including me, are facing some massive changes in the future so seeing a character (that will evidently be so successful and strong as Kate) dealing with these issues in a way that makes her happy is going to be so important. It’s like LaCour and Levithan are showing that you can take which ever path you want, whenever you want, a message perhaps not echoed enough within our very demanding education systems.
“Whatever this is that’s happening between us, it’s another part of the tower I have to burn down.”
The way the book began was key in making the novel so easy to get into. It felt like as soon as you were on the first page of ‘You Know Me Well’, you knew the book and its characters well. In a lot of books, I often find myself waiting for the action to start or for the characters to start being complex enough to be interesting but in this one, I think the authors really cracked it. Here you were straight into the whirlwind plot, chewing down on each development of the plot and hanging off every line of every chapter.
“The heart is a treacherous beast”
Levithan and LaCour were also brilliant in the way in which they made their relationships complex without being confusing. There’s often a thin line between realistically complex and confusingly complex and here the authors found themselves on the right side of that line. Each relationship was complicated enough to mirror the oddities of real life relationships which again helped the plot and the characters become so much more vivid.
However, I did have one bug bare with this book that caused a lot of minor issues, knocking off that fifth star I was so tempted to add. The book should have been longer. If it was longer, we wouldn’t be left with the WTF moment of Mark and Kate becoming such close friends so quickly. And there wouldn’t be that small niggling feeling that the authors were just rushing through to finish the novel due to the speed at which the plot was carried off.
“I say maybe because when you’re a teenager there’s this rule: You aren’t supposed to make a decision based on love. You are supposed to tell your heart that it is a fickle thing. You’re supposed to remind yourself of Romeo and Juliet and how badly it turned out for them. Your poor teenage heart. It isn’t equipped for decisions like this. Except maybe. Maybe. It is.”
It would also help with dealing with some of the smaller details in the book that could have done with more explaining. I feel like Kate’s relationship with Lehna was only slightly gone into and the same with Violet. If it was longer then I think there’d be less confusion or lack of info on both relationships. I do, however, think that Mark’s relationships were detailed fantastically but I didn’t really feel a connection to the character outside of relationships and personality. I just couldn’t picture him as a body with more going on than what the book detailed.
“Here we come. It’s our parade.”
Also, what was up with that Brian guy? Was he just a really bad gay stereotype or was he just acting that way because of his job? That was something that should have been explained too.
But regardless of the limits that have been set due to the relatively short length, this is one fantastic read that is bound to become a favourite.
The Argle Bargle 