The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

On Friday, a present came to me in the mail...a present I had bought for myself...The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan. It's his newest novel, this one his first written as an "adult" novel. Though I really hate the terminology...I think that any YA could enjoy the book just as much. I started to flip through the pages...beginning with the "A's" and came across this:

abstraction, n. Love is one kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn't you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren't yours. It's not as if I can conjure you there completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead.

And from there on out I couldn't put the book down and read all 211 pages of it in one sitting. Not that it was hard to do. The above passage was set on one page. The book is literally set up like a dictionary, but still reads like a novel. Different from anything I've read before, but quite beautiful. It tells the tale of two lovers by going through the alphabet and sharing pieces of their lives together through definitions of different words. Some words take up a whole page..some just a sentence. It's not always a happy love story. It's upsetting at times. It hurts sometimes. It's not what we want as a reader for the couple. But love doesn't always consist of what we want for each other either...but I suppose it's the compromises that we make for each other to make it work that makes it beautiful.