Lola and the Boy Next Door - Stephanie Perkins ***FAVORITE ROMANCE OF 2011***

This does not qualify as a proper review. It is simply me fangirling about my latest only love, Cricket Bell.

If I’m the stars, Cricket Bell is entire galaxies.

This book!! This perfect, wondrous, amazing book! I love it so so much! A quarter of that is because of the story, a quarter because of Lola, and half because of Cricket Graham Bell. He is just so sweet! And innocent, loyal, caring, and downright adorable!! Hell, he's even cuter than this, and I don't say that lightly:

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And much as I would love to kidnap take Cricket away from Lola, his love for her is what I love the most about him. The way he pines after her, gets hurt whenever she does, takes care of her, does her hair, just who he is when he's around her makes me wanna cry and gush at the same time.
“So you believe in second chances?” I bite my lip.
“Second, third, fourth. Whatever it takes. However long it takes. If the person is right,” he adds.
“If the person is . . . Lola?”
This time, he holds my gaze. “Only if the other person is Cricket.”

So there. I love this book, I love Cricket, and I love Stephanie Perkins for creating such a sweetheart. And just for the record, the cover fits Lola and Cricket perfectly. I love that, too.

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And the first person to tell me the number of times I used the word "love" in this review can help themselves to my personal stash of chocolates.

Favorite Passage:

“Once upon a time, there was a girl who talked to the moon. And she was mysterious and she was perfect, in that way that girls who talk to moons are. In the house next door, there lived a boy. And the boy watched the girl grow more and more perfect, more and more beautiful with each passing year. He watched her watch the moon. And he began to wonder if the moon would help him unravel the mystery of the beautiful girl. So the boy looked into the sky.

But he couldn’t concentrate on the moon. He was too distracted by the stars.

And it didn’t matter how many songs or poems had already been written about them, because whenever he thought about the girl, the stars shone brighter. As if she were the one keeping them illuminated.

One day, the boy had to move away. He couldn’t bring the girl with him, so he brought the stars. When he’d look out his window at night, he would start with one. One star. And the boy would make a wish on it, and the wish would be her name.

At the sound of her name, a second star would appear. And then he’d wish her name again, and the stars would double into four. And four became eight, and eight became sixteen, and so on, in the greatest mathematical equation the universe had ever seen. And by the time an hour had passed, the sky would be filled with so many stars that it would wake his neighbors. People wondered who’d turned on the floodlights.

The boy did. By thinking about the girl."

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