Imagine this:
You’re in your favourite bookshop, scanning the shelves. You get to the section where your favourite author’s books reside, and there, nestled in comfortably between the incredibly familiar spines, sits a red notebook.
What do you do?
The choice, I think, is obvious:
You take down the red notebook and open it.
And then you do whatever it tells you to do.
From these opening sentences of Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares I was hooked. Set in New York in the days leading up to Christmas, and a few days after, the story alternates between the characters of Dash (written by David Levithan) and Lily (written by Rachel Cohn). Lily is the girl who left the notebook in the bookshop for just the right guy to come along and accept the challenges found inside. Dash accepts the first challenge and leaves the notebook for Lily to collect. The notebook continues to be passed back and forth between them, with the help (and sometimes hindrance) of their friends and family members. They decide to meet each other, but will the boy and the girl in the notebook measure up to the boy and the girl in reality?
I loved everything about Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares. Dash and Lily are great characters with lots of personality, and their family and friends that help them complete their dares are hilarious. The authors have created a real sense of time and place and I really wanted to be there with Dash and Lily, celebrating Christmas in New York. It’s the perfect book for this time of the year, whether you love Christmas (like Lily) or loath it (like Dash).
Christchurch City Libraries Blog 