welcome Daniel Handler to the YA YA Brotherhood

WHY WE BROKE UP by Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) with illustrations by Maira Kalman (Little Brown, January 2012) is Handler's first foray into the YA world, and a fine debut it is. Min, short for Minverva, as she will tell you, is different. She prefers film festivals. With her friends, she mocks contemporary music. Generally, she marches to her own tune. And then she meets Ed when he crashed a party. Ed is co-captain of the school's basketball team. Could two people be more different? Somehow, though, there is a connection, a strong one. Before long, Min is attending basketball practice as well as the games, and Ed is watching art films and trying to fit into Min's world. Readers know immediately, though, that this course of true love did not run smoothly as the novel opens with Min writing a letter to Ed in which she is warning him of he thump he will soon hear against his front door as she returns all of the mementos of their short time together. This is where Maira Kalman's illustrations heighten, elaborate, and inject details into the story. Do not think for one minute this is a typical teen angst-ridden drama about love gone wrong (though it is that). Handler's exquisite use of language, his turn of phrases, his incredible play with words (and we know that about him already from his other books) takes this from ordinary to an oft-overused adjective: EXTRAORDINARY, the only adjective that really fits here. It is not a novel to be summarized; it is a work of art to be read and re-read and read aloud. For those of you who are tired of the books that have masqueraded as romances, Handler's story is to those novels what cinema is to something like "Caddyshack." <154>

Muchas gracias to the lurvely Victoria Stapleton for sending this gem to me. I owe you, Viklets!