Review : A Little Something Different by Sandy Hall
A Little Something Different by Sandy Hall
Pages : 272
Genre : YA, Romance
Stand alone
My Rating : 3.5/5
About the Book :
But somehow even when nothing is going on, something is happening between them, and everyone can see it. Their creative writing teacher pushes them together. The baristas at Starbucks watch their relationship like a TV show. Their bus driver tells his wife about them. The waitress at the diner automatically seats them together. Even the squirrel who lives on the college green believes in their relationship.
Surely Gabe and Lea will figure out that they are meant to be together….
My Thoughts :
A Little Something Different tells a traditional love story through unconventional means: rather than following the future happy couple around, we get to see their story unfold through the narration of about a dozen narrators – everyone but the two loverbirds.
I’ll admit the narration is what got me curious about the book, yet it was also what I feared the most about it; many of the books I’ve read featuring two or more narrators failed to create distinctive voices, making their stories only more confusing. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case here! The narration alternates from one voice to the next quickly, keeping it fresh and interesting, and while some of the voices blurred together a little, the chapters are so short it wasn’t hard to keep up with the story. By the end of the novel, I felt like I knew who Lea and Gabe were more than I knew the narrators, even though they hadn’t narrated a single word of the story. I think that’s an impressive feet, and it shows how the author did great managing all these characters!
There’s two things that took a little away from my enjoyment. One I can’t hold against the author, is that while I like romance in novels, I’m not really a fan of romance novels themselves. And maybe A Little Something Different was just a little too fluffy-cutesy for me. The characters are in college, and yet the story felt younger than some other high school stories I’ve read. It’s okay, and it was still good; we just weren’t a perfect match, this book and I!
The other thing was that, while I appreciated how the narrators gave us a look on boths sides of the story, at times it got repetitive. You’d see a scene through someones’s eyes, then again as Lea told what happened to her best friend, then again as Gabe did the same. I think a few cuts here and there would have made things a little more interesting.
All in all though, A Little Something Different was just what the title promised : a slightly different take on a story often told, filled with a lot of heart. It definitely put a smile on my face!
The repetitive nature of multiple narrators gets to me sometimes too.