Title:
Why We Broke Up
Author:
Daniel Handler
Author:
Daniel Handler
Illustrator:
Maira Kalman
★★★★☆
4 out of 5 stars
I'm telling you why we broke
up, Ed. I'm writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened.
Min Green and Ed Slaterton are breaking up, so Min is
writing Ed a letter and giving him a box. Inside the box is why they broke up.
Two bottle caps, a movie ticket, a folded note, a box of matches, a protractor,
books, a toy truck, a pair of ugly earrings, a comb from a motel room, and
every other item collected over the course of a giddy, intimate, heartbreaking
relationship. Item after item is illustrated and accounted for, and then the
box, like a girlfriend, will be dumped.
Min, according to Ed, is an artsy girl she is quite
different from the other girls he has dated, she likes old movies and lattes.
Ed is a basketball player whom likes to say “no offense” after actually
offending someone, and he does it quite a lot, he is absolutely sexy and a
player. They come from different worlds and their relationship is destined to
fail.
The story of their break up is told from Min’s perspective;
the book itself is a really long letter to Ed, where Min exposes all the reasons
why they didn’t work out as a couple and gives back all the items that remind
her of him. I liked how the main character acknowledges there’s more than one
reason behind it all, that things were more complex than just one thing gone wrong;
I thought that was very realistic.
As much as I liked this book, it has many flaws, so I
am divided about how I feel about it, part of me thinks it was predictable and
obvious, the side characters were non important, not to say the main character
(Min) was exhausting and her constant old-movie-references felt a little bit
forced. But then, the other part of me was flooded with nostalgia, and that
part overpowered the former.
Maybe I was too influenced by my own history that I
couldn’t see past it, but I just couldn’t shut off my own emotions, and to be
honest I think that if I ever re read this book my rating might go down.
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