Tonight the Streets Are Ours by Leila Sales

Description on Goodreads:

From the author of This Song Will Save Your Life comes a funny and relatable book about the hazards of falling for a person you haven't met yet.

Seventeen-year-old Arden Huntley is recklessly loyal. Taking care of her loved ones is what gives Arden purpose in her life and makes her feel like she matters. But she's tired of being loyal to people who don't appreciate her—including her needy best friend and her absent mom.

Arden finds comfort in a blog she stumbles upon called "Tonight the Streets Are Ours," the musings of a young New York City writer named Peter. When Peter is dumped by the girlfriend he blogs about, Arden decides to take a road trip to see him.

During one crazy night out in NYC filled with parties, dancing, and music—the type of night when anything can happen, and nearly everything does—Arden discovers that Peter isn't exactly who she thought he was. And maybe she isn't exactly who she thought she was, either.

Review:

This was another book that seriously resonated with me. I didn’t immediately fall under its charm like I did with This Song Will Save Your Life. I found Arden a little harder to relate to. I’ve never seen myself as selfless as Arden has worked so hard to be. It was kind of like I could never see myself in Abegnation in Divergent; I just don’t think I’m that good. Yet, there’s some thing so great about Sale’s writing style. Even though I didn’t relate to Arden so much (particularly in the beginning), I still got sucked into her life.

The family dynamic of the mom who runs away, fed up with the life she was given/made for herself really reminded me of older period pieces from the 50’s where housewives felt a very similar fate. And I love that the book really worked hard to define what love was. It’s scary to think that anyone like Arden and her mother would so unjustly define it as sacrifice. I don’t think I could have done what Arden did for her best friend in the beginning of the novel. She thinks love is sacrifice, but she’s also really brave and strong to do what she does.

I think I enjoyed the second half of the book a lot more than I did the first. I loved the road trip, the adventures, the drama of it all. I found the first half of the book to be a lot of backdrop and almost too much explanation for why the characters are the way they are. I kind of wish it started in the middle for real and not just for a page. But the second half of the book more than made up for it.

I’m surprised there isn’t more YA out there that covers the topic of fandoms. One of the reasons the book Fangirl was such a hit for me was that it covered unchartered YA territory, and I think this book does a bit of that as well. It’s about a girl who loves a blog and goes as far as finding the writer of the blog and meeting him. I like how Arden found someone who voiced what she was feeling online. That seemed beyond real. And I’m not sure how I feel about people tracking down bloggers…but I like that Arden learned that her blogger wasn’t all he appeared to be. It was an important lesson to learn.

I love how much Arden learned over the course of the novel (a very short moment of time-mostly one night). And I love that it wasn’t about falling in love so much as realizing what love really is. I feel like this was a book that dealt more with friendship, family, and self confidence than it did romance, and that was refreshing as well.

This book wasn’t as powerful as I was hoping it to be. The lessons learned in it were good ones. The characters, if not the most relatable, were very real. I ate it up. I loved it and read it super fast, and had one of those deep breath, “now what?” kind of moments when I finished it. I wish some of the beginning was taken out. But overall, the book stuck with me in a good way. I give it a 9/10.