A Review of 'Her and Me and You' by Lauren Strasnick

"'I met Fred first.'


Fred: Hot.  Enigmatic.  Alex's first friend in her lonely new town.  Maybe her first... everything.


'I met Adina the following Monday.'


Adina: Fred's twin sister.  Cold.  Troubled.  Trouble.

'I kissed him.


She pressed her mouth to my mouth.'


People warn Alex to steer clear of the twins, but Alex is drawn to them.  She wants to be part of their crazy world... no matter their consequences."

This book felt like a vacation... a vacation where it rained for an entire week.  What I mean is, as soon as I got to the end of the book, I couldn't believe that the author had ended it as fast as she did.

Let's start with something good and try to end the same way.  I was really enjoying Lauren Strasnick's writing style.  It was choppy, in that there were many fragmented sentences, but I thought it worked well because it resembled the way certain people think.

I didn't like the way the book ended.  I was left with so many questions!  Does Alex's mom eventually get visibly better after the divorce?  What about Adina's anorexia?  What happened between Alex's mom and dad to make her father go together with Caroline?  It's questions like these that ran through my head.  In short, too many loose ends were left behind.

I liked Lauren Strasnick's characters, but I felt they could have been developed a lot more.  These characters felt like ideas of characters that could be rather than real people.  Fred was about as mysterious as Edward Cullen in Twilight, Evie and Alex both had horrible mood swings and the smallest thing could tick them off, I couldn't really tell what Adina's motives were for basically attacking Alex.  I guessed that she just wanted her brother to herself, but I'm not certain that I could back up my theory properly if you asked me to.

I also wish that Lauren Strasnick had developed the story a bit better.  Don't get me wrong, I liked what was there, but like I said above, many loose ends were left dangling and those could have been avoided with a longer book or some other method that I haven't thought of.  I wanted to see how Alex and Caroline resolved their differences and I also wanted to see if Adina's efforts eventually led to her downfall (and I'll be honest, I was hoping that she'd at least get shipped off to boarding school.  I would have been happy).

I like the short chapters in this book.  In my history of reading, those have been my favorite kinds of chapters because they tend to break up the story a bit more and it makes the story flow better (in my opinion).

The cover is absolutely gorgeous!  That was the main reason why I checked it out of the library (the interesting-sounding blurb was reason two).

While there were several good things about Her and Me and You, there were just as many not-so-good things that put a damper on the reading experience.

I give Her and Me and You:

Thanks for reading!

--Jude