Friday Favorites #19: Jennifer E. Smith


Friday Favorites is a weekly meme, hosted here, that spotlights a favorite author, book, series, publisher, cover, blog, etc. Basically whatever bookish thing that you love, recommend, and want to tell others about. Just pick one and link up to my post each Friday to share. You can use the graphic I used above, the other one here, or your own.


I've talked about this before, but it just seems that last year really brought some great books and new authors to YA. One of my favorite reads was The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, which I won from Jen @ YA Romantics during a giveaway hop. You can see my review on Goodreads. It was a great contemporary YA and clean as well.

Goodreads Summary:

Who would have guessed that four minutes could change everything?

Today should be one of the worst days of seventeen-year-old Hadley Sullivan's life. Having missed her flight, she's stuck at JFK airport and late to her father's second wedding, which is taking place in London and involves a soon-to-be stepmother Hadley's never even met. Then she meets the perfect boy in the airport's cramped waiting area. His name is Oliver, he's British, and he's sitting in her row.

A long night on the plane passes in the blink of an eye, and Hadley and Oliver lose track of each other in the airport chaos upon arrival. Can fate intervene to bring them together once more?

Quirks of timing play out in this romantic and cinematic novel about family connections, second chances, and first loves. Set over a twenty-four-hour-period, Hadley and Oliver's story will make you believe that true love finds you when you're least expecting it.


This year she released This Is What Happy Looks Like, which I loved as well. I know not everyone did and that's okay. You can see my review for it on my blog.

Goodreads Summary:

If fate sent you an email, would you answer?

When teenage movie star Graham Larkin accidentally sends small town girl Ellie O'Neill an email about his pet pig, the two seventeen-year-olds strike up a witty and unforgettable correspondence, discussing everything under the sun, except for their names or backgrounds.

Then Graham finds out that Ellie's Maine hometown is the perfect location for his latest film, and he decides to take their relationship from online to in-person. But can a star as famous as Graham really start a relationship with an ordinary girl like Ellie? And why does Ellie want to avoid the media's spotlight at all costs?



Next year she is set to release The Geography of You and Me, which sounds completely fabulous! You can add it to your Goodreads tbr here and pre-order it from Amazon here.

Goodreads Summary:

Lucy and Owen meet somewhere between the tenth and eleventh floors of a New York City apartment building, on an elevator rendered useless by a citywide blackout. After they're rescued, they spend a single night together, wandering the darkened streets and marveling at the rare appearance of stars above Manhattan. But once the power is restored, so is reality. Lucy soon moves to Edinburgh with her parents, while Owen heads out west with his father.

Lucy and Owen's relationship plays out across the globe as they stay in touch through postcards, occasional e-mails, and -- finally -- a reunion in the city where they first met.

A carefully charted map of a long-distance relationship, Jennifer E. Smith's new novel shows that the center of the world isn't necessarily a place. It can be a person, too.




Why she is a favorite:

There seems to be a theme here. All her books seem to include long-distance relationships and communication between the MC and her love interest happening in different ways (email, postcards, phone) or at interesting places (plane, elevator, movie set) or both. I have really loved how she has worked this into her books and how she uses it to drive her plots and build relationships between her characters in such unconventional ways.

I also really love her book covers, which all seem to match. Very fun colors and snapshots that represent an event from each book.

However, the main reason I have fallen in love with this author is that I love her characters, the humor they portray, the real-life stuff that they are dealing with (divorce and abandonment in the first two books), that her books are clean, that it isn't instant-love between the MC and her love interest, the friendships between characters (not just the boy, but a friend or mother or both), and that there are happy endings, even if a little bittersweet.

If you read YA Contemporary Romance, I highly recommend you give her a try! I actually need to go read her older books and see what I think of them.



About the Author
(from her website) 

Jennifer E. Smith is the author of This Is What Happy Looks Like, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, The Storm Makers, You Are Here, and The Comeback Season. She earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and currently works as an editor in New York City. Her work has been translated into 27 languages, and her next young adult novel, The Geography of You and Me, will be out in Spring 2014.

You can find Jennifer here:




Do you have a favorite to share this week?

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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