Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins is a companion novel to Anna and the French Kiss which I reviewed a while ago. Lola focusses on a different character who forms part of the same social group as Anna, the protagonist from the first book. Like Anna and the French Kiss, Lola and the Boy Next Door is a cutesy YA romance novel with great characters. It is an easy, fun read and I really enjoyed it. What I liked The character. Lola is an engaging protagonist and I enjoyed reading about her emotional journey. The challenges she faces were well portrayed and I liked how she overcame them. The supporting characters were also well developed, particularly Nora, and gave a good foundation for Lola’s romance. Although I didn’t enjoy the love triangle, it was consistent with Lola’s growing self understanding in the book. The writing style Perkins’ writing style is very fresh and immediate and easy to read. I fairly flew through the book. Lola’s non traditional family. It’s fair to say that Lola is growing up in a rather non traditional family. I appreciated the way Perkins portrayed this as just a variation of contemporary family…
So welcome to my first reading roundup of 2015! Yay! The first thing I want to talk about this week is my GoodReads reading challenge for 2015. I failed to achieve my goal of 100 books last year – I read 91 – and I noticed that because I was listening to more audiobooks, books were taking me longer to finish. This year I have set my goal for 75 books. That’s still just under a book and a half a week. My family was also very generous to me over the festive season. I was showered with Amazon and iTunes vouchers – thanks everyone, you know me well! I also received the gift of Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please! book in my Christmas stocking. I look forward to reading that. This week I did something I don’t often do – I accepted I was never going to finish a book and removed it from my currently reading list. The book in question was Endgame by James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton. I’m sorry, but life is too short to stick with a book that really isn’t doing anything for me. You can check out my review to see why I dumped…