In another Rachel Cohn and David Levithan duet, this novel is about a friendship rather than a relationship. It, once again, takes place in New York City, though the City is much less central to the plot than it was in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist and Dash and Lily's Book of Dares. NAENKL is about the difficulties of a platonic relationship, since Ely is gay and Naomi still harbors feelings for him. Instead of having only two of them as narrators, there are several other people in the story who take turns narrating. There is a lot of symbol-smiley-face lingo in the book, from Naomi's narrative end. At first the symbols were annoying, but by the end they fit the situation. I also appreciated how flawed both Naomi and Ely were. I liked them so much that it was distracting when someone outside the two of them was narrating the story. While the other characters were great, a few of them felt pointless and after their respective chapter they never surfaced in the story again. One little thing: When Naomi and Ely pair off, I wasn't impressed with their significant others. (Not naming anyone.) They weren't boring, they just weren't very memorable, and they got in the way of the Ely-and-Naomi storyline. All in all, I still really liked this novel. It's nice to have a book written about friendship instead of romance.
