Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares | Christmas Book Review

Because it’s Christmas time and I promised myself to read lots of Christmas books this year (not working thaat well tho haha) and also because I just heard good things about this book, I recently read Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. All in all I definitely enjoyed the book, but honestly not as much as expected.

The book is, as its title already says, about Dash and Lily and their Book of Dares. It basically starts with Dash who finds a red notebook in a bookstore, including things it dares him to do, written by a girl named Lily. Dash does those things, but instead of putting the notebook back like he should do, he keeps it with him and leaves Lily tasks she should do to find the notebook. It goes on like this with both writing dares and little riddles into the notebook for each other, so the other one will find the notebook again afterwards. But besides the tasks they give each other, they also start talking through the notebook. Even though they don’t met, they’re really open and honest to each other and talk about things that are on their mind. And somehow they begin to really like the other one, but the question is: is meeting each other going to destroy the whole magic of the notebook?

It could have been so beautiful: Christmas in New York, two teenagers exchanging a mysterious notebook, slowly falling in love.. The basis of the book was great, but I think the two authors could’ve made more out of it. It started of really good and I totally liked the idea of a notebook that’s being exchanged between two people. I loved the conversations between Lily and Dash, especially what Dash wrote. He’s just pretty different then other male protagonists in books, which I loved. Dash likes to read, he has an obsession with words and expressions and he’s definitely not that typical bad boy, even though he’s kinda snarly how everyone describes him. Lily is completely different than Dash, which already starts with her obsession of Christmas and Dash’s hate towards it. Lily is this liveful, cheerful and nice girl, who walks dogs, doesn’t go out late and loves her family. But writing into the notebook starts to change her, makes her more daring, what she definitely enjoys. I loved that strong and independent side of Lily, she just doesn’t care what other people think, which was really refreshing for a female character. I think for Lily writing into the notebook is more a way to find herself and for Dash it’s rather finally being honest to someone about how he really is. That’s for sure a side I loved about the book, the smart conversations and to read what they think about certain things. Honestly. one of the characters I liked most in this book was Sofia, Dash’s ex-girlfriend. I guess she’s supposed to be just a secondary character, but she often said things that really made me contemplate.

You except more to happen after the good beginning, but for a long time they just keep on exchanging the notebook and doing what the other one wanted. It took really long until finally something more happened. And I don’t want to spoil anything but I didn’t really enjoy the love story at the end. For me it just didn’t really felt like there’s – I don’t know how to say it – “love in the air” and an occurrence destroyed the love story a bit for me. I’m not really a romantic person, but it still could’ve been more romantic for me (or maybe I’m a romantic I don’t know .. haha). But I still liked the thoughts about love they had.

As I already said, I mainly read Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares, because it’s supposed to be a Christmas book and I’m kinda disappointed because I don’ really think that’s true. Even though it’s set during Christmas time and includes the complete holidays, Christmas wasn’t really one of the main points of the book. Especially at the beginning you do notice that it’s Christmas time there, but it gets less and less. And for me there just wasn’t really a huge Christmas feeling coming up. When I read a Christmas book, I expect it to get me into the festive mood, but this one unfortunately didn’t.

Another thing I definitely liked was the way the book is written. Sometimes it was actually quite hard for me to understand everything, because english is not my mother language, but I liked that the writing style was not that simple. It’s often humorous, especially what Dash says. The book includes a lot of thoughts, about life and love and friendship, and I personally really enjoy that.

At the end I found it really hard, I actually still do, to rate this book. It’s one of those stories, where you like things but also dislike some other things, which makes it hard to decide whether you liked it or not. But even though I wish it would’ve been more christmassy and a bit more exciting, I still liked it. I still enjoyed reading the book and I especially loved Dash. There’s something wise about the story and I think maybe next year I’m also going to read the second part. I can still recommend you to read Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares, because I liked the idea of it and yeah maybe you don’t even dislike the things I did, who knows. But for me it’s not a must-read.

I hope this review helped you somehow! Are you planning to read Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares?