AFTER THE KISS

Camille is new to Atlanta, Ga. Becca, on the other hand, has lived there her entire life. The two girls don’t know each other and have nothing in common save for a haiku-writing baseball player, Alec. Alec is Becca’s longtime boyfriend, but since Becca had to take a job at a coffeehouse, they’ve started growing apart. Alec kisses Camille at a party, accelerating his breakup with Becca. Camille is still fragile from a pre-Atlanta relationship, so she and Alec never quite get off the ground as a couple. The kiss itself, though marketed as the most important event in the book, is only one of many incidents that force both Becca and Camille out of their own minds and into their lives. Speaking in a second-person stream-of-consciousness narration, Camille is hard to get to know; there are often a lot of excess words to wade through before getting to the meat of her ideas. Becca speaks in verse, sometimes free, sometimes parodying famous poems. Her observations are occasionally sublime but sometimes nonsensical. Cheers to the formal experimentation, but it doesn't quite succeed. (Fiction. YA)