Winter Town by Stephen Emond

Title: Winter Town

Author: Stephen Emond
Publisher: Little, Brown Young Readers
Acquired: Received free for an honest review
Age Group: Young Adult

Grade: 75% or C
Buy It: Amazon

Every winter, straight-laced, Ivy League bound Evan looks forward to a visit from Lucy, a childhood pal who moved away after her parent's divorce. But when Lucy arrives this year, she's changed. The former "girl next door" now has chopped dyed black hair, a nose stud, and a scowl. But Evan knows that somewhere beneath the Goth, "Old Lucy" still exists, and he's determined to find her... even if it means pissing her off.

Garden State meets Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist in this funny and poignant illustrated novel about opposites who fall in love. 

My Thoughts::
After reading Happyface by the same author, I was able to read a short excerpt from this book and automatically got very curious. Unfortunately when I received it for review, it had to go to the bottom of my review pile, because I like to play fair and read books in the order that I receive them. But I read as fast as I could and finally got to it.

Once again our main character is an artist. Now, here is something that I've been noticing after reading several books from the same authors, most of their main characters have the same traits in each book, for Emond, it's the quiet artistic type. I'm not exactly complaining here, because I like that kind of character, but it does seem kind of lazy on the author's part. Besides the double vision I got, I really enjoyed Evan's character. He was nice and sweet, but also had a good amount of humor and teenaged angst to make him more interesting. Usually when books have more than one narrator, they switch chapters back and forth between them, but instead the first half is Evan, and the second half is Lucy's. I found this very cool because we don't automatically get to learn Lucy's motives and feelings, we have to wait for them.

I usually read books with a very strong plot, and that focus less on character development, but this book had the opposite. I found myself bored, but cared greatly about the characters and the eventual outcome. Though, I don't think that this is enough to carry a book.

Overall, Winter Town wasn't a very interesting read, but managed to capture part of my heart with it's characters. I would recommend this book to readers who like a simple sweet winter read, or just like seeing art in books.