TITLE: Love and Other Perishable ItemsAUTHOR: Laura Buzo
PUBLISHER: Alfred A. Knopf
PUBLICATION DATE: 12/11/2012
FORMAT: Hardcover
PAGES: 243
SOURCE: Bought
MY RATING:
INSIDE COVER SUMMARY: Love is: heart-wrenching, tongue-tying, butterfly-inducing. But most of all, love is awkward.
Amelia should know.
From the moment she sets eyes on Chris, she is a goner. Lost. Sunk. Head over heals infatuated with him. It's problematic, since Chris, 21, is a sophisticated university student, while Amelia, 15, is 15.
Amelia isn't stupid. She knows it's not gonna happen. So she plays it cool around Chris--at least, as cool as she can. Working checkout together at the local supermarket, they strike up a friendship: swapping life stories; bantering about everything from classic books to B movies; and cataloging the many injustices of growing up. Their conversations crackle with wit and repressed longing, and as time goes on, Amelia's crush doesn't seem so one-sided anymore. But if Chris likes her back, what then? Can two people in such different places in life really be together?
OVERALL IMPRESSION: I enjoyed this book. It's a quick contemporary, but it still has depth to it. I feel like it's really relateable because what teenage girl hasn't had a crush on an older boy?
I really enjoyed the references to all of the other books, I just wish I had actually read the books they were referencing so I could know more what they were talking about. But this was a solid, enjoyable book that I would recommend.
CHARACTERS: I liked both Amelia and Chris. I felt that they were believable. Amelia's parents made me angry though. I was extremely agitated about the fact that they would just expose their kids to all of that secondhand smoke and act annoyed when Amelia complained about it.
COVER: The cover is adorable. The mason jar is cute, the font is cute, the layout is cute. Cuteness all around.
