I have a love/hate relationship with short story collections. On one hand, they're quicker to read, offers variety for people with short attention spans (like moi), and showcases the author's versatility. On the other hand, I personally haven't found a book of s.s. which made me fall in love with all of the stories in the collection.

Until "How They Met", that is.

Methinks I read a rave review or two of this collection of stories about falling in love by David Levithan of Boy meets boy and Nick and Norah's IP fame. I saw an open copy in Powerbooks and proceeded to read the first story: "Starbucks Boy", finished the story with a huge grin on my face and decided that this book is worth the original non-Booksale price. (If you know me, I rarely buy books that are not from Booksale, because I'm stingy--and practical like that, haha).

I cannot NOT mention the blurbs, because I am gullible and prone to reading it to get a taste of what's in store. Here, Detroit Free Press labels it as "Pure reading pleasure."

My feelings for this book have never been summed up more succinctly.



Created as a V-day gift for friends, the stories about love here are written by Levithan out of boredom, but then evolved into a yearly tradition. The story that started other stories was written during his Physics class, with references to laws of Physics, metaphors so clearly relatable to love.

Fast-paced and witty without being pretentious, I was able to read it in one night, promising to write down particularly meaningful passages, but I got too lazy.

Each story made me feel different levels of giddy. "Miss Lucy had a steamboat", which recalls a meeting-liking-loving-pining after sort of relationship, is bittersweet, glimmering with wisdom one can only acquire after a heartwrenching breakup.

Levithan's style is accessible, lyrical and sweet but not cloying. I am aware that this is a YA book, but his writing is sharp and smart enough to make you want to revel in these layers of complex emotions brought upon by adolescence and continuing to adulthood, if that made sense, haha. I imagined it as a queer-friendly movie in my head, an LGBT "Love, Actually", with openly gay and happy characters sharing a snippet of their lovelife to the expectant audience.

The whole book reads like a movie, which isn't exactly a bad thing for me, and I could almost imagine this scene in "The Alumni Interview" where Ian is interviewed by his boyfriend's father for his requisite alumni interview:

"It also says you were involved in something called a Pride March?"
"Yes. We dress up as a pride of lions and we march. It's a school spirit thing. Our mascot is a lion."
"I thought it was an eagle?"
"It used to be an eagle. But then our principal's kid saw The Lion King and got hooked. You know how these things work."


It is noticeable how angst-free the stories are, despite the characters getting in trouble or getting their hearts broken over and over or or or. Levithan proves that you don't have to be all cuss-y and whiny to express the intensity of how you feel. Is it possible to have stories with reckless abandon, raw and honest at the very core, but absent of cheese? Because I've encountered cringe-inducing sapfests, and I dove into this book, thinking I'd get maybe one or two of those, but curiously, there is none. I think that is where Levithan's magic lies, in his ability to combine these short, simple words to create something much greater. Like so:

"I think one of the highest compliments you can give a person is that when you are talking to her, you are not thinking about the fact that you are talking to her. That is, your thoughts and words all exist on a single, engaged level. You are being yourself because you aren't bothering to think about who you should be. It is like when you talk in a dream."

"We talked so much that we started to feel like we did know each other, as if every shared story could create an actual shared past."

The stories are compelling enough on their own, but read as a whole, this collection provokes and inspires the readers to open their minds and see variations of this thing called love (and its permutations) with rainbow-tinged glasses on.

If this book were a person, she'd be that bespectacled quirky girl who sings with reckless abandon while commuting. Maybe wearing a necklace she made herself, or reading some obscure book that you coincidentally like too. Someone so interesting and stalk-worthy, someone you can't help but have a huge crush on.

I'd totally go out with this book.



What I think: 10 unicorns

We hold hands as we walk through town. If anybody notices, nobody cares. I know we all like to think of the heart as the center of the body, but at this moment every conscious part of me is in the hand that he holds. It is through that hand, that feeling, that I experience everything else. The only things around me are the good things--The mesmerizing tunes spilling out from the open door of the record store; the older man and the even older woman sitting on a park bench, sharing a blintz, the 7-year-old leaping from sidewalk square to sidewalk square, teetering and shifting to avoid stepping on a crack.

The night before, I unlock my closet of origami paper--over a thousand sheets of bright square color. I turn them all into flowers. Every single one. I do not sleep. I do not take breaks. Because I know that as well as giving him the flowers, I am giving him the time it takes to make them. With every fold, I am giving him seconds of my life.
With every flower, part of a minute.
I tie as many as I can to pipe-cleaner stems.
I arrange bouquets and lattices, some topped by cranes.
In the morning, I garland them throughout the halls, centerpiecing it all at his locker, so he'll know that they're all for him.
Every minute, every crease, is a message from me.



I can honestly say that it's been a long time since I was blown away by a ya love story. Especially something with an LGBT theme, so this was a pleasant surprise. I first read Levithan's work in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, and then I saw his collection of stories about love entitled "How they met and other stories", and that book was just SO good, that after reading the first story at a bookstore, I just had to have it. So I could savor it more thoroughly. But that's another story.

This book reminds me of the feeling of being in love, of how it feels when you see your crush, or when you begin to develop an explicable kind of fondness for someone. It has a lot of heart, and the sensation I got while reading it was akin to reading a modern-day fairytale, where you root for the hero, and pray that he gets his deserved happy ending.
It's predictably saccharinely sweet, but never cloying, for Levithan has this love affair with words, as well.
I read it expecting something like boy meets boy, boy falls in love, struggles with some identity issues, overcomes it, and loves boy back, proudly.
But it ISN'T like that.

Levithan knows how cliche and predictable that is and so he takes a slightly different path for his story, something I never would have expected in your typical lgbt ya novel. But he doesn't stray too far away from being a nice love story, and I loved every word. I cried in some parts (but that might be the pms sniffling), and got so giddy about others that I just had to finish it in one sitting so I can immediately pimp it to my officemates. This is the kind of book meant to be shared right away, so everyone can just bask in the afterglow and then maybe burp rainbows, in that happy, goodvibes sort of way.


What I think: 10 unicorns