If you live long enough, your reward is that you get to watch everyone you love die, or leave you behind.
How many people out there have just struggled with being nobody? Well, not being nobody, but nobody special. What if you’re just not the smartest, or the prettiest, or the boldest? What if you’re average, maybe a little above the fray, but who cares about you anyways?
If you’re in this middle ground, you probably have this intense need to find the one thing that defines you, the one thing that will move you from your average rankings to someone worth remembering. That’s why we’re living, right? To be remembered?
Arden found that one thing at age eight. Arden is ‘recklessly loyal’, as her Just Like Me doll tells every little girl that buys one of her. Arden’s the one who picks up the pieces, mends the fences and faces the consequences for everyone she loves. It’s just that nobody has ever loved her back the way she loves them. Her mum left, her dad is there and yet not, her best friend doesn’t appreciate her enough and her boyfriend cares more about a mining movie than her. Why?
And on one of those self-pity spiralling nights, she googles a question, and she finds someone. A boy, with a blog, living in the city that never sleeps who seems to understand her; who seems to be perfect. And before she knows it, she’s so invested in his life, in his story, that it’s more important than the life she has.
One day she can’t take her life like this anymore, and this boy needs her, recklessly loyal and everything – and so, in her car with her friend, they make the six-hundred-mile trip to New York, to meet the creator of Tonight The Streets Are Ours.
There must be more to love, more than this.
Tonight The Streets Are Ours was this fast-paced book that I couldn’t put down and for the life of me, I currently cannot figure out why it’s been sitting on my TBR for so long!
What I think I loved the most about this book was New York. When Arden describes walking in for the first time, I felt like I was transported back to four years ago: the first time that I visited and crossed the bridge into Manhattan.
I loved that the characters were flawed, but I find it really hard to understand their flaws. Did nobody tell Arden that it was okay to not be perfect – isn’t that one of the most basic lessons we learn? That it’s okay to be you and not a shiny angel statue? Peter, in the end, turned out to be an obnoxious jackass, and everything said and done, IT DID NOT GIVE ME CLOSURE. Wasn’t he supposed to learn something? Or, at the very least, weren’t we supposed to get more than “self-congratulatory, naval grazing and aimless?” It felt like a very abrupt ending, even if the point was that the story isn’t always the truth, aren’t we supposed to get something more from it?
POINTS FOR: New York (!), Just Like Me dolls, the blog, the story inside the story, the fast pace, the cover.
POINTS AGAINST: Shallow flawed characters, an abrupt ending.
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Buy this book at the Guardian Bookshop
