Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
featured on le petite book's mancrush monday!
"it's like when a kitten tries to bite something to death. the kitten clearly has the cold-blooded murderous instinct of a predator, but at the same time, it's this cute little kitten, and all you want to do is stuff it in a shoebox and shoot a video of it for grandmas to watch on youtube."
based off of the name of this book, i honestly expected it to be something like [b:The Fault in Our Stars|11870085|The Fault in Our Stars|John Green|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1360206420s/11870085.jpg|16827462] (or basically any other ya book that deals with terminal illnesses, death, and a boy/girl duo that's brought together under harrowing circumstances,) but joke's on me: this book is different. in a world of very much the same ya books, pulling on the same heart strings with the same prose and angles, this book was unique. it was funny and it was sad and more than anything else, it was refreshing. it was nice to see someone handling a bad situation in the same way that i would.
does that mean i'm maybe kind of a dick? yeah, probably, because i think our narrator was supposed to be considered kind of a dick, but i loved that about him. i loved that he was begrudging about having to spend any time with this girl, that he didn't know her and that he was more afraid of the concept of death itself than losing the girl who was sick. he understood that it sucked to be sick, that it sucked that she didn't get to plan a future or have fun with her friends, but it didn't make him suddenly start seeing her as a saint, a martyr, a beautiful woman that he could fall in love with. he wanted to be her friend and make her happy in her final moments, but the situation wasn't glorified in this book. it was realistic, perhaps even a little bit gritty, and it was actually hilarious. i laughed out loud a lot - which isn't something i usually do, just for the record.
i loved every single character in this book. i loved the relationships - the good, the bad, the neutral. i loved the development in the main character, and how easy i found it to just relate to the way the people in this book thought/acted/spoke. in short: i loved this book.
