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Starred Review */ The meet-cute master behind The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight (2012) and This Is What Happy Looks Like (2013) delivers her best book yet, a straightforward, old-fashioned swoonfest that, in another time, would be a film starring Audrey Hepburn. One sweltering summer day, Lucy and Owen get stuck on an elevator in their New York City high-rise. Well, it’s her high-rise, really—Owen is the superintendent’s son living in the basement—but class differences vanish with only a few feet of breathing room. They are freed, and the few hours of citywide blackout that follow become an enchanted fissure in time wherein the two establish a deep connection. The bulk of the book details their winding paths back to “the heat and spark and flame” they found in the dark, as Lucy is tugged around Europe by her successful parents while Owen and his newly jobless father hit the American highways in search of work. Yes, it’s another take on An Affair to Remember, and no, there’s nothing new here. But it’s a classic dish served up with style, heart, and a long-distance yearning immediately recognizable to anyone who has had to love from afar. And Smith makes it all look as effortless as the charmed rapport between Lucy and Owen.
Summary
Sparks fly when Lucy Patterson, 16, and Owen Buckley, 17, meet on an elevator rendered useless by a New York City blackout. Soon after, the two teenagers leave the city, but as they travel farther away from each other geographically, they stay connected emotionally, in this story set over the course of one year. The center of the world isn't necessarily a place. Sometimes, it can be a person.
Read the first few lines...
"On the first day of September, the world went dark.
But from where she stood in the blackness, her back pressed against the brassy wall of an elevator, Lucy Patterson had no way of knowing the scope of it yet.
She couldn't have imagined, then, that it stretched beyond the building where she'd lived all her life, spilling out onto the streets, where the traffic lights had gone blank and the hum of the air conditioners had fallen quiet, leaving an eerie, pulsing silence."
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