Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist - David Levithan, Rachel Cohn

I won’t say much about this because for one it was relatively short at 180 pages and secondly as cute as it sometimes was, there wasn’t a huge amount of substance.

 

Nick, our teenage protagonist is playing a gig with his band and spots his ex-girlfriend, Triss, walking towards him with her new boyfriend. He grabs Nora, a girl he’s never met, and asks her to be his girlfriend for the next five-minutes so that he doesn’t lose face in front of Triss. The five-minutes that Nick and Nora are together leads to an attraction and they end up spending the night together.

 

This book was narrated by both Nick and Nora in alternative chapters, which I always enjoy. It didn’t add much to the story in this instance, though, because Nick and Nora’s perspectives read as quite similar.

 

The thing I liked best was the structure, it being set over the course of one night. It’s quite unusual for a book to be set over such a small time-frame. Usually that type of structure is confined to a shot story. It does limit the span of the narrative though, which it clearly did here as this was so short.

 

The themes were typical for a YA, like identity, love etc. As it was so short nothing was explored with much depth, though.

 

None of the characters were particularly likeable. Nick was pinning for Triss the whole time which got a bit repetitive. Then we had Nora who abandoned her drunk friend to Nick’s mates, who she didn’t know, by getting them to take her friend home so she could continue partying. Okay, Nick’s friends asked her to spend the night with him, but regardless, it was completely implausible. Nick’s ex-girlfriend Triss featured throughout and was pretty self-consumed and didn’t add much.

 

There were a lot of holes in the story but I did like Nick and Nora’s interactions and that alone kept me reading.