Review: Dash and Lily's Book of Dares

Dash and Lily's Book of Dares, by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan is a semi-romance novel set during Christmas time

Reviewer's Note:
Oh my Gosh. I just found out a movie may be made out of this book!!!!!! *extreme fangirling* I just Googled it up as part of my research on books when I review them (yes, I'm a nerdy person, do you have a problem with that?) and thisIMDb page came up! If you just viewed this page, you'd know it's currently categorised as 'in development' right now in IMDb... Okay, back to the review. I just get so excited when a book I've read is beingturned into a movie!

Review:
What if one day, you found a red book, filled with challenges for things to do? Would you pick this book up and accept those challenges? Or would you put it down, refusing all the possible adventures that may follow? Reading this introduction below, I felt compelled to follow Dash and Lily's adventures with their red book. Have a look at it:

The blurb I read just sounded so positively mysterious! I picked up this novel because I was curious about how a little red book could spark up anything, like helping build a friendship that possibly could delve into a romance.

I found the plot of this book very enticing. I mean, wouldn;t it be interesting if you met someone through a little red book that you planted in a bookstore? It would leave me pacing around the room, dying of curiousity about what would happen next. Would anyone pick up my red book? What if a joke was being played on me, and after I completed those challenges, someone would jump out and yell, 'Gotcha!'? What if my mystery correspondent stole my book? The mystery in this book was just perfect.

I kind of dozed off once every few moments when reading this book. I'm not quite sure, maybe it was the tone of the novel? It seemed very monotone at times for me. Plus, there was a lot of irrelevant information in the book for me. In one part of the novel, Lily talks about how a walk on a street is enjoyable. I saw no point in this particular sentence. Maybe it was to give readers a glimpse of how Lily thought, but I found it completely irrelevant and boring. Instead of elaborating the story and having fanciful, but unnecessary descriptions (Haha, 'fanciful', a reference to this book. Read it to understand), why couldn't the authors just skip on right to the next part without describing Lily's walk?

Then there were the characters that made me want to pull out my hair. There was Sofia, with her relationship with Dash. Thatt was one confusing relationship. It confused me. Really it did. What was its point in this story, which I might add, was named after Dash and Lily? I don't mind secondary characters, I have nothing against them, but only when they have a purpose in the story, i.e. Boomer. Sofia seemed to just be there for Dash to cuddle with whenever he wanted to.Dash's extreme cynicsm got on my nerves sometimes. Dash's extreme cynicsm got on my nerves! Why did he have to be such a cynic about everything to do with Christmas?

As I've mentioned before, in a previous page, I don't like books with multiple POV's, because they confuse me. This book was OK, in the sense that I only got confused once or twice. One memorable time was at the start of the book. I'm the kind of reader that doesn't pay too much attention to the little details. So I missed out on the ginormous heading at the top of the first chapter stating 'Dash'. So I proceded on to read the book, thinking I was reading from a teenage girl's perspective. I only really realised that Dash was a boy when one of Lily's questions asked if he was a guy. Hooray for me. This book made me crack open a dictionary (well, not a physical one, one on my Kindle device) to discover what some words meant. That wasn't a bad thing; in fact, I assume it was intentional. I learnt what words like 'persnickety' meant (I'm not going to tell you the definition of it, go crack open your own dictionary!). It was very educational indeed.

In conclusion, I'd rate this book a 3.5 stars out of 5 stars. Overall, it had a very nice plot, but I just didn't like how I occasionally dozed off because the authors rambled on a bit and how there wre secondary characters that seemed too transparent (i.e. Sofia). Nevertheless, despite these flaws, this is definitely a nice Christmas read, one to read by a hot fireplace. Although Christmas for last year is already over, who cares? If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, grab this book and read it while it's still snowing. Or if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, grab this book in preparation for the cold winter approaching soon!

If you enjoyed this review, head over to www.corrallingbooks.blogspot.com to read other reviews of interesting books such as this

Links
The Invisible Author's Society Content page for Dash and Lily's Book of Dares-http://the-invisible-authors-society.wikia.com/wiki/Content%3A_Dash_And_Lily's_Book_of_Dares Goodreads page-http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7741325-dash-lily-s-book-of-dares

Rachel Cohn's Goodreads page- http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13139.Rachel_Cohn

David Levithan's Goodread's page- http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/11664.David_Levithan