A Little Something Different by Sandy Hall

I've had Sandy Hall's A Little Something Different on my shelf for years now. What initially attracted me to this young adult romance was the pretty cover art (it turns out that I DO judge books by their covers). The description on the back promised a different sort of love story - one told from the perspective of everyone except the couple themselves. Intrigued by how that narrative strategy would play out, I picked it up and added it to my never-ending "to read" pile. With my Thanksgiving break winding down, I decided that it was finally the right time to give this little book a shot.

The plot concerns two college students named Lea and Gabe. From the moment they meet in their creative writing class, they are instantly attracted to each other. Everyone around them can sense the spark they share, but they are both too shy and awkward to take the plunge and strike up a real conversation. Lea is just a freshman, and is a little nervous about interacting with others in her new environment while Gabe is struggling with some issues stemming from a car accident he was in a year ago. All they can muster up the courage to do is share some meaningful glances, which do nothing but embarrass them both.

Fate, however, seems to be trying to help them connect. They bump into each other constantly on campus, get paired together on class assignments, and even live in the same dorm building. Everyone around them, from their friends, to their family members, to their classmates, to random strangers on the street try to push them towards each other. The story is told from the viewpoints of fourteen different characters that want to see them grow closer, and as readers, we hold our breath along with them, hoping that either Lea or Gabe will finally take the plunge and get together.

This novel's biggest strength is its sweetness. Lea and Gabe are both nice kids that you want to see succeed. The multiple viewpoint narration definitely adds to this element, as we see them behave in ways more endearing than they would probably describe their own actions. I liked that the narrators were both friends and strangers to the pair, because this allowed me to get different sorts of information about them. Gabe's brother, for example, provides information about Gabe's personal life and history, while the barista at Starbucks gives a more objective picture of his actions. Both types of observations are necessary to round out the story. Along the way, important details about the pair are revealed through random bits of conversations, allowing the reader to gradually piece together who these characters are. It was a unique way to tell a story, and I liked it.

Also, one of the narrators is a squirrel that runs around their campus, and that was awesome. That was my favorite viewpoint out of the fourteen.

Where A Little Something Different struggles is its momentum and realism. Lea and Gabe are so obviously perfect for each other that it becomes tiring to see them constantly fail to connect. In order to keep them apart for a novel's worth of material, Hall resorts to increasingly dubious reasons for them to misunderstand each other. It was very easy to forget that I was reading about college kids, because the book contained a lot of high school-style drama with gossip, rumors, confusion, and pointless dishonesty driving a lot of the plot. It got to a point about halfway through the book where the pace felt very slow and repetitive. It was too much of them almost getting together and then at the last second something messing it up.

It also got very hard to believe that so many people would spend such big portions of their time and energy on getting Lea and Gabe together. When you have to resort to having a professor design actual college assignments around two of her students falling in love, you may have run out of ideas. Similarly, I doubt that a Chinese delivery guy would actually tell their customers they should get together based on similar takeout orders. More than once. I think that the narrative strategy would have been stronger if there had been more nuance to the observations and contributions of the different narrators.

My version of the book included a short interview with Sandy Hall in which she described her evolution as a writer. She actually has a background in writing fanfiction, and she got this work published through an online forum where writers post chapters of young adult romance novels for readers to comment on and rate. She also says that she wrote A Little Something Different, her first novel, in only six days. This was followed by a lengthy editing process in which she rewrote a lot of scenes and deleted over a dozen additional narrators. This could explain some of the issues I found while reading. Perhaps her earlier versions allowed for more realistic stretches of character development.

In any case, A Little Something Different was a very sweet read. The unique narration was interesting to explore and I liked both Lea and Gabe, even if I found some of their decisions frustrating. This will make a very appropriate addition to my classroom library - some of my 8th graders are bound to fall in love with it. There's not much here for adult readers, who will pick up on how some of the plot events are overreaching, but teens will enjoy the cute romance of it all.


Challenge Tally
TBR Challenge (previously owned): 52/60

Total Books Read in 2017: 66