Friends with ARCs | Four Days of You and Me + The Paper Girl of Paris

Four Days of You and Me by Miranda Kenneally

pub 5/5/20 by Sourcebooks Fire
Young Adult - Contemporary
Received ARC from author for review

Four Days of You and Me is Miranda Kenneally's first book outside of the Hundred Oaks series (which I am a huge fan of!) and I was very excited to see what she would do. It follows Lulu and Alex, who start off as "enemies" to becoming something much more over the course of their four years in high school. We get glimpses into their relationship starting from freshmen until senior year, but only on May 7 because that's when their class takes their annual class trip and when things begin between them. I love this concept in theory but it's such a hard one to pull off in my opinion. With only a one day glimpse into their lives, it felt like we were only skimming the surface of these characters. I was interested in in Lulu, Alex and all the ups and downs of their relationships but I found myself wanting to know and see everything that happened in between the May 7 of one year to the next. With only these tiny snapshots, it was difficult to really feel invested. I still enjoyed it though but had the book just spanned all of their high school experience, I would've loved it because Kenneally's writing is fun and engaging and I like the stories she tells. In this case, the one-a-day gimmick worked against the book and to be fair, of the 3-4 books I've seen attempt this I can only think of one that pulled it off for me (One Day by David Nicholls in case you were wondering).

What was your most memorable class trip? | Two immediately came to mind. The first was in elementary school when we went to the Statue of Liberty. Despite my fear of heights, I went all the way up to the torch thanks to the help of a family friend who held my hand the entire time. The second was going to Six Flags for senior/graduation week of college. The only reason why it was memorable is because that was the first and last time I rode a major rollercoaster.

The Paper Girl of Paris by Jordyn Taylor

pub 5/26/20 by HarperTeen
Young Adult - Historical Fiction
Received e-ARC from pub for review

The Paper Girl of Paris gave me some very unexpected feels and made me miss Paris a ton! There are two perspectives. In the present we have sixteen-year-old Alice who is spending the summer in Paris with her parents to see the apartment her grandmother left her in her will. No one in the family even knew it existed and when they finally open it up after seventy years, it raises a lot of questions about their family history and Alice is determined to discover the truth. In the past, we meet another sixteen-year-old named Adalyn who is living in Paris during Nazi rule and wants to fight back somehow. When she meets Luc, the leader of a resistance group, they use her socialite status to turn her into a spy and it leads her down a path of lies she never expected. As you can imagine the two young women are intertwined somehow and I found myself drawn into both sides. I enjoyed seeing the Paris I remembered through Alice's eyes and I admired her determination to honor her grandmother by searching for the truth. I will say that some of her other drama and conflict didn't interest me as much or could've been handled a bit better. But everything related to the apartment and her grandmother fascinated me. With Adalyn, I think her perspective may have been my favorite. Even though I can't even imagine what she was living through, her path was heartbreaking but also inspiring. She had this fire that wouldn't be put out and was willing to take risks for her country, even when she could never claim out loud to her family what she was doing. I honestly think I could've read a whole book just about her!

What do I miss most about Paris? | The food, the view of the Eiffel Tower and how easy it is to wander around this beautiful city.

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Collaborative feature with Alexa. We read ARCs together and post our reviews on the same date.