Critics' Opinion:
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Published May 2015
400 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
In the two years since her father died, sixteen-year-old Eva has found comfort in reading romance novels - 118 of them, to be exact - to dull the pain of her loss that's still so present. Her romantic fantasies become a reality when she meets Will, who understands Eva's grief. Unfortunately, after Eva falls head over heels for him, he picks up and moves to California without any warning. Not wanting to lose the only person who has been able to pull her out of sadness - and, perhaps, her shot at real love - Eva and her best friend, Annie, concoct a plan to travel to the West Coast to see Will again. As they road trip across America, Eva and Annie confront the complex truth about love.
In this honest and emotional journey that National Book Award finalist Sara Zarr calls "gorgeous, funny, and joyous," readers will experience the highs of infatuation and the lows of heartache as Eva contends with love in all its forms.
BookBrowse Review
Margo Rabb's Kissing in America is an enjoyable romantic, journey novel. It's too bad that it is a little too light on the heart. I can see where other reviewers might enjoy it more. It has a good voice. It has good plotting. Ultimately, it's a fine book. My problem with it is that there is nothing really interesting about it. The protagonist, who does like her mother and then doesn't and then does, decides to travel across the country to be with a boy she barely knows. She meets a couple of other people who are basically ordinary people. It's not boring, but, at the same time, it is.
Other Reviews
"Starred Review. Sprinkled with the poetry Eva reads and writes, this story makes for a hilarious, thought-provoking, wrenching, and joyful quest." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. A smart teen's novel. [The] characters are authentic and complex. Rabb knows the perfect point to interject humor to diffuse a potentially devastating situation—a leavening of sorts to the reality that death and love inexplicitly alter the landscape of a person's life." -Booklist
"Starred Review. With a full cast of multidimensional characters, this novel explores the complex nature of relationships and the many faces of grief and love with equal parts humor and poignancy ... A first purchase for most YA collections." - School Library Journal
"Starred Review. Wise, inspiring, and ultimately uplifting - not to be missed." - Kirkus
"Humor and depth ... Often entertainingly snarky." - The Horn Book
"That Margo Rabb can write a story so gorgeous, funny, and joyous that is also unsentimental and honest is a testament to her skill and to her heart. I loved everything about Eva and the supporting cast in this beautiful novel." - Sara Zarr, author of The Lucy Variations
"A wonderful novel about friendship, love, travel, life, hope, poetry, intelligence and the inner lives of girls. Margo Rabb writes with compassion and clarity about lives that are worth telling, journeys that need to be taken, peace that needs to be reached. I loved it." - Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray Love
"Wonderful ... Margo Rabb has created nothing less than a women's map of American mythologies, navigating from Emily Dickinson to Barbara Cartland, from the cowboys of the rodeos to the makeup studios of Hollywood, and from the bottom of the Atlantic to the spacious skies of the USA." E. Lockhart, New York Times bestselling author of We Were Liars
This information about Kissing in America was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Margo Rabb is an acclaimed novelist whose debut, Cures for Heartbreak, was hailed by critics and young readers alike. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Rumpus, Zoetrope: All-Story, Seventeen, Best New American Voices, New Stories from the South, and One Story, and have been broadcast on NPR. She received the grand prize in the Zoetrope short story contest, first prize in the Atlantic fiction contest, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award. Margo grew up in Queens, New York, and has lived in Texas, Arizona, and the Midwest; she now lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two children.
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