The Geography of You and Me

There are few things worse than having longed to read a book only to get it in your hands and realize that it was far, far from what you anticipated. And even worse when you thought you were going to get a specific kind of story only to realize that what was actually between that cover was not what was advertised on the back.


Lucy has lived all her life in New York, resided on the twenty-fourth floor in an elegant apartment building. Owen has just moved from Pennsylvania with his dad and now lives in the basement apartment in the same house as Lucy. They’ve seen each other before but not talked until that day when they got stuck in the elevator together, during a city wide blackout. After they get out they spend the night together, waiting for the power to come back on and enjoying each other’s company. But when power is restored and everything returns to normal, Lucy and Owen is faced with reality once again. And reality means moving in two different directions and probably never seeing the other one again.

This is what the back of the book promises, what I thought I would get when I read the novel. From what I gathered, Lucy and Owen would be stuck in the elevator for some time and then spend the rest of the night wandering the streets of New York together. I thought they would move in two different directions but keep in touch through postcards, letters, email and phone calls, because that’s what the back of the book told me. That’s not what happened. This is what the book really is about:

Lucy has lived all her life in New York, resided on the twenty-fourth floor in an elegant apartment building. Owen has just moved from Pennsylvania with his dad and now lives in the basement apartment in the same house as Lucy. They’ve seen each other before but not talked until that day when they got stuck in the elevator together, during a city wide blackout. After they’ve spent less than an hour in the elevator, they get rescued and decides to go outside to get some provision before returning to the building and spending the rest of the night on the roof, staring at the stars and finally falling asleep. It takes them a month to both leave New York, while the back suggests it’s just a few days. And I would hardly say that the occasional postcard and email was “staying in touch”. Also, I’m lead to believe the novel runs over the course of one year when in reality it’s nine months.

What does this have to do with anything, you might wonder. Well, I feel cheated, that’s what I feel. I was promised a story about two people meeting in an elevator, spending the night together and forming a bond that would last over thousands of miles. It was a love story, the back of the book promised me. But from where I was standing, it was more a barely evolved friendship.

Lucy moves to Scotland and Owen goes west with his father. They stay in touch through postcard, from Owen’s side since the “going out west” didn’t actually mean “move out west” but “going on a road trip”. That means Lucy doesn’t have an address to send postcards to and have to settle for emailing, which Owen never replies to. Lucy sends multiple and gets very short postcards in return. They never send letters. They never text. They never talk on the phone. They do chat, once, and wonder why they’ve never done it before, but that’s toward the end of the book. Owen says he’s not a social network kind of person and Lucy thinks she’s better from afar than in person. This creates somewhat of a weird relationship. Before they leave New York they only spend that first night together, because it seems impossible for either of them to knock on the other’s door once the power is back on. Does this sound like a great love story? No, didn’t think so.

Since the novel is made on the grounds of Lucy and Owen communicating with thousands of miles between them, the story kind of falls flat when that communication doesn’t work. Lucy meets a guy in Scotland and they get together but she feels guilty since she doesn’t know what Owen is to her. Owen meets a girl in Tahoe and does not feel guilty because he knows that Lucy is just his friend, but he does get jealous when he finds out she has a boyfriend. After an autumn with a few postcards and emails and then radio silence for weeks they meet up, eat some Mexican food and fight and don’t talk for months, but both breaks if off with their partner. It’s a weird story told in third person and alternating chapters which lets you see what both characters are up to. They have no chemistry and there wasn’t one moment when I wanted them to end up together. I really couldn’t see it and somehow the entire novel evolves around this relationship which is farther away from a love story than anything I’ve read before. It was, if anything, a disaster.

At times I felt like too much happened without it really happening anything at all. It was just a lineup of places and cities and countries they visited as the story moved on, like it was things that author Jennifer E. Smith thought should happen but never put any real feeling into while writing. It left the novel shallow and boring. It was a page-flipper, yes, but not in a good way. And about 70% through I swept past ten pages which only contained a few sentences each. It was pretty much just one chapter of “Lucy said this to her mom” and one where “Owen said this to his dad.” In one chapter Lucy turned west and Owen east. In one Lucy breathed in and Owen breathed out. I see what Smith tried to do here and it was a novel try, I’ll give her that, but it did not work out. All it really did was piss me of, because even though I saw what she tried to say, what did it bring to the story? A bunch of mostly empty pages and unnecessarily killed trees.

Throughout the novel I had the feeling that it was a book. Sometimes when you read you forget it isn’t real. You believe the characters are actually alive and you’re invested in their story. But in The Geography of You and Me I knew it was a book all along and it wasn’t just that nothing happened to make me forget it, it was so obvious that it followed a carefully crafted storyline which practically made you see the author behind every word, behind every event. That’s not a good story and neither, by the way, was the writing.

Something that struck me as odd was Lucy’s parents and her relationship with them. She was sixteen and they had been, and still were, traveling around the world without a care for either her or her brothers (now moved away from home). Lucy was left on her own in New York while her parents were in Paris or London. She accepted that without ever saying it was weird, because that’s how it always had been, and she didn’t even say that she thought it was unkind of them to later move to Scotland and bring her along without consulting her. They just sprung it on her one day and when they later left Scotland to move to London, just a few months after that, again they just heaved it on her with no care in the world, like it didn’t matter that she had just spent a few months in a new school and now needed to start yet another one. Lucy accepted that, too, though she didn’t really like it but never said so. And when she spoke to her mother about always having wished she could’ve come on her parents trips around the world, her mom kindly told her that if that’s what she really wanted then she could’ve just asked. Like, okay. Sorry, mom, that I didn’t realize all I had to do was ask to come along when you and dad flitted of to Paris for three weeks.

Next to them, Owen’s dad seems a bit better, but when you think about it, I’m not sure he is. See, Owen’s mom passed away a few months before the book takes off and now he and his dad is trying their best to escape the pain of that on a road trip across the U.S. But wait, isn’t it in the middle of a school year? Oh, it’s so good, then, that Owen is a genius and has enough credits that he doesn’t need to attend school. He can just read on the road, enlist in a school when they stay in a place long enough for it to seem worthwhile, and then move on to another town. But if that’s the case, why doesn’t he just graduate early so he can leave all the tedious and boring studying of things he already knows behind him? This was an odd, odd move from the author and Owen’s dad as well. I realize that the U.S is different, but something like that would never be accepted by neither authorities nor schools where I’m from.

As you can see, I have nothing nice to say about this book and a lot of complaints. Probably, again, because I feel cheated. I was promised a delicious pizza and I got a cold sandwich. The story was boring and the characters had no depth. The chapters were too short and nothing really happened. There was no real flow and no real feeling, just words that didn’t mean anything. I never connected to neither the story nor the characters and after a while I just wanted to finish it and move on to something more deserving of my time. In the end I was left empty and tired and I couldn’t tell you one good thing about this novel if you so threatened me with a gun. This is not what I would call a good book and definitely not a good love story. I advise you to save your money and give your time to a book more worthy of it.