The Infinite Moment Of Us | Lauren Myracle | Book Review

Upon closing The Infinite Moment Of Us by Lauren Myracle, I literally said out loud to my boyfriend, “well that was dumb.” I do not go into books expecting to dislike them. Friends, I went into The Infinite Moment Of Us expecting all of the emotions, sexytimes, and an accurate depiction exploring first love. What I got was pretty much a mess. Granted, you do not have to take my review all that seriously and if you want to try this book for yourself go ahead, plenty of people I trust genuinely liked it. It might just be me who could not get into this alternating point of view contemporary young adult novel.

The Infinite Moment Of Us by Lauren Myracle | Good Books And Good Wine

The Infinite Moment Of Us by Lauren Myracle takes place in Atlanta during the summer between senior year of high school and freshman year of college. It’s all about Charlie and Wren, two youths who fall deeply in love over the course of a month. Basically this book explores that headlong rush you get from the first stages of falling in love, it doesn’t really go into the sustaining the love or anything and kind of perpetuates the notion that your first love is your forever love — which is the case for some people but seems to be the only perspective I ever see in young adult romances. Anyways, with the end of the summer of love, Wren and Charlie must make some pretty big decisions affecting their futures and their relationship with each other.

I found Wren to be so boring. She basically does whatever her overbearing parents tell her to do because she’s so interested in being a people pleaser. Then, after she finishes high school she has this sort of epiphany that she has to do things for herself, and first among those things is Charlie. Charlie is the first boy that she has ever been involved with, both romantically and sexually. Basically, Wren’s biggest problem in life is that her parents care about her and want her to have a future where she is financially secure. Jeez, what a rough life this girl lives! Anyways, this isn’t a spoiler but she gets this scholarship to prestigious Emory College and decides to instead go to Guatemala for a year for this thing called Project Unity teaching underprivileged people how to read and speak English. At least, those are her plans before Charlie enters her life and she gets all torn about staying in ATL for Charlie or going to Guatemala. Either way, this girl is total white bread. Boring.

Charlie, her love interest, boy of the alternating chapters is slightly more interesting. According to the author note he is very good looking. Charlie has spent his life going through the foster system and through a series of successively awful parents until landing with Chris and Pamela, and eventually, Dev — a little brother in a wheelchair. He’s very close with his foster family and spends his free moments working at Chris’s cabinet work shop. Basically, Charlie falls for Wren because she’s innocent and such. Yawn. Anyways, Charlie is a poor. So, we consistently read about his crappy flip phone and how his options are a whole lot different from Wren’s. Anyways, I think that Myracle did a good job portraying Charlie’s sexuality but I still found him slightly uninteresting.

The Infinite Moment Of Us totally rubbed me the wrong way and I guess to save time, I’ll just bullet point the reasons and you can be your own judge of whether you want to read the book or not, I’d never discourage you from forming your own opinion on a book.

  • Slut shaming: So, Charlie has a former flame named Starrla. She is obviously the villain of the story, as she is sexually experienced and still wants Charlie for sexytimes but not love. She’s basically the whore in comparison to Wren’s madonna. Starrla is described as being the sort of girl who wears tight jeans with thongs, oh no. And Wren is supposedly so much better because she’s innocent and loses her virginity to Charlie and wears J. Crew and dresses like a soccer mom. Ugh. The whole portrayal of Starrla rubbed me the wrong way.
  • Minor racisim: At one point, while talking about Starrla, one of the characters – PG says that she talks ‘ghetto’. He also says something about how she hangs out with Black people, like it is a bad thing. I mean, there is one Black character who is portrayed positively but he gets maybe 5 pages of time, if that. I don’t know. I just was irritated by this whole ghetto = bad, because we all know that ghetto is code for People of Color. Fuck that, you guys.
  • The writing is godawful. I mean, there’s a scene where Charlie and Wren prattle on and on and on about loving each other forever and I’m like oh for fuckssake. Seriously, it’s vomit-inducing. And don’t look at me like I am saying that because I am some romance novel hater, I am not, I love romance novels. This book was not on that level at all.
  • One of my friends on Twitter likened this book to Say Anything, one of my favorite movies of all time. In retrospect, I have to agree, this book is like a very poor man’s Say Anything, but the characters are not nearly as interesting as Llyod Dobbler and Diane Court. Like, there’s even a scene, LOLOLOL, where Wren is at a party and a girl tells her that Wren inspired her, much like the scene in Say Anything where Llyod is key master and the one girl is like Diane, you inspired me and I never would have gotten into Cornell without feeling competitive with you.

Disclosure: Review copy provided by publisher

Other reviews of The Infinite Moment of Us by Lauren Myracle:

Sarah Reads Too Much – “This book kind of bothered me.
Lost In Lit – “This was two souls colliding.
Writer Of Wrongs – “it just never won me over

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April is in her 30s and created Good Books And Good Wine. She works for a non-profit. April always has a book on hand. In her free time she can be found binge watching The Office with her husband and toddler, spending way too much time on Pinterest or exploring her neighborhood.
About April (Books&Wine)

April is in her 30s and created Good Books And Good Wine. She works for a non-profit. April always has a book on hand. In her free time she can be found binge watching The Office with her husband and toddler, spending way too much time on Pinterest or exploring her neighborhood.

Comments

  1. I feel like I’ve seen way more negative than positive reviews of this. Personally I liked it okay though I was very uncomfortable with the portrayal of Starrla, which I thought was not well-handled at all. Have you read this author’s Shine? I thought that was loads better.

  2. I loved Shine, so I was seriously considering reading this one, but maybe I’ll read a few more reviews before deciding whether or not to go for it. This love story sounds scarily similar to my own, so I might check it out purely for the life parallels XD but seriously not sure if worth it for the slut-shaming and racism…

  3. Ugh! I hate when I read a book thinking it will be decent due to reviews, and then hate it. (Taking Chances.. I’M LOOKING AT YOU!)

    This book has been on my to read list since I recieved at ALA. Looks like it’s going to be pushed down the list again.

  4. Ugh. I can’t think of anything worse than bland, stock, carichatures of people. If there’s no depth to the characters, how can you expect to care about them? You just can’t. And if you don’t care about the characters then there’s really nothing else that will make the story better. I would say I’m sorry this didn’t work out but if slut-shaming and minor racism are really in this book, then I’m not sorry about it all. Like you said, fuck that!

  5. Great review. Your curses made me smile. I did want to read this book, but only half-heartily.

    Ain’t nobody got time for that!

    Happy reading!

    -indiereadergirl0329
    indiewritergirl0329.wordpress.com

  6. I felt exactly the same way about this book, April. I was going to DNF it and decided I wanted to review it, so I forced myself to slog through until the end. Starrla, in particular, really bothered me, since she was just a ridiculous cartoon. When it came down to it, every element of this novel read as heavy-handed to me, and the author’s note just cemented that opinion for me. And the dialogue… just UGH.