Book Review: Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler

Why We Broke Up

Published by Little Brown Books for Young readers

December 2011

368 Pages

Summary

I'm telling you why we broke up, Ed. I'm writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened.

Min Green and Ed Slaterton are breaking up, so Min is writing Ed a letter and giving him a box. Inside the box is why they broke up. Two bottle caps, a movie ticket, a folded note, a box of matches, a protractor, books, a toy truck, a pair of ugly earrings, a comb from a motel room, and every other item collected over the course of a giddy, intimate, heartbreaking relationship. Item after item is illustrated and accounted for, and then the box, like a girlfriend, will be dumped.

My Thoughts:

   I wanted to love this book. I saved reading it so it would be the first book I read in 2012. The concept sounded fabulous. A girl (Min) delivers a letter and a box to her ex-boyfriend (Ed) with the intention of illustrating  why they broke up. I loved the concept, I loved that illustrations of each of the items she returned to her ex was included in the book.  I thought Min and Al were likable.- Not Ed of course, but the writing style got in the way of everything I liked about the book.

Unfortunately, I did not love the writing.  The sentences, paragraphs, and pages seemed to run together. I get that we were seemingly in Min's consciousness, experiencing her thoughts as she wrote them, but those thoughts felt jumbled and were challenging to decipher. There was too much dialogue as well.. "I said" then "you said" then "she said", I found it made the story disjointed, stilted and hard to follow. Perhaps I didn't fully understand the authors intentions, or maybe I built the book up so much in my own head, that I couldn't be anything but disappointed. I think what's more likely is that this type of writing style, just isn't for me.