I just finished reading and reviewing Why We Broke Up (it will appear in my March column) by Daniel Handler with illustrations by Maria Kalman. This book better get a boatload of attention come awards time because it really is excellent. Kalman's illustrations make it standout and will bring some readers to it that might otherwise ignore YA (and the overall design is fantastic - quite deserving of design awards) but Handler shows a whole new side of himself here. I can hardly believe this is the same author as the Lemony Snicket books (not that they aren't great). The subject, style, approach, etc is all so different that I had to remind myself that really, yes, this guy is that guy - he did write all of these books. Handler just slays the competition with Why We Broke Up though. If you don't respect the man after reading this then you don't know good writing.

So yeah. I really liked this book.

The drill is pretty straightforward: Min & Ed have broken up and she is giving him a box of relationship souvenirs along with a letter explaining the significance of each. Min explains each item and Kalman's illustrations provide us with poignant visuals. Along the way readers learn how they met, about their first dates, the reactions of friends and the ongoing struggle to fit their romance into their lives. Ed is a jock (co-captain of the very successful basketball team) Min is, well the easiest definition for everyone seems to be "arty" because she and her friends frequent the old movie theater and she dreams of being a director. But in a stunning three page section at the end, Min blasts all the expectations of who she is supposed to be and instead lays out all her insecurities and fears and who she thinks she really is and it is both painfully honest and brutally sad. In those words she is everyone who ever loved and got their heart broken, everyone who ever believed in a fairy tale even when it demanded so much of them and made them reconsider who they are and who their friends are and what they are willing to be in order to have that shivery moment when the one you crush on crushes you back.

Oh, how we sacrifice so much for those moments.

Here is a bit that really rang true for me, Min's thoughts after attending a basketball game as a "good girlfriend" even though sports are so not her thing. The plan was to attend the game, wave the pennant and be the girl his friends expected her to be and then after making a brief appearance at the after party they would head off to the movies together (which she wanted to do). Things don't go that way though:

I waited for you, Ed, to make it all worthwhile, and when you kissed me and said "I told you you'd like it," that was the only part I liked. But I just kissed you, too, and let you hoist my backpack with yours onto your beautiful shoulders and walked next to you, my fingers sweaty on the scroll of the pennant, not knowing where to put my hands as we grouped up in the parking lot to carpool to Cerrity Park. What else could I do? There was no choice, as far as I could think. You won the game, we won the game, the party afterward, the drinking, the big blaze, and finally alone someplace too late, I had no choice, not from the moment I first saw this flag fly. I had no choice. We weren't going to sneak off to the movies instead, just talk anywhere, someplace else. Not the co-captain, not that night, not with me the new girlfriend and that's why we broke up.

Page after page after page is like this, moments that echo the common high school experience so many of us share. Why We Broke Up is a new American classic, the closest thing I've read in a long time to what it means to be a teenager. I can't recommend it enough or say how strongly I think it is a book that every teen, or everyone who has been a teenager, should read.

[Interior shot from the book; see more about Maira Kalman at Design Sponge, as well as a peek in her work space.]