Alex, Approximately

ALEX, APPROXIMATELY is the perfect anytime read. Its sweet and sad and romantic and hilarious. It introduces a main character who is delightful and witty and quirky and a little bit fierce. It is full of clever banter, palpable chemistry, and charming mishaps. It has moments that are intense, heartbreaking, daring. It is instantly captivating, positively adorable, and absolutely unputdownable. It is a love story that promises to be unforgettable.

Bailey Rydell doesnt do direct. She isnt called the Artful Dodger for nothing. So when she decides to move across the country to live with her dad in California, she cant quite get around to telling Alex, her online friend-but-maybe-more.

It doesnt matter that Alex lives in the same town as her dad. Or that he wants her to come out and meet him. She just isnt willing to take that big of a risk on someone whose real name she isnt even sure she knows.

But if she can find out who he is without him knowing about her, and hes everything she thought he was and hoped he would be, then maybe shell be willing to take a chance and reveal her identity. She just needs to find him.

Which turns out to be not quite as easy as she thought it would be, given what she already knows about Alex. Although the very distracting, maddening, gorgeous, Porter Roth might be to blame for her lack of progress. And for her waning interest in finding Alex at all.

Jenn Bennett makes it so easy to fall in love with her novel. From the writing that immediately draws you into the story and keeps you engaged and invested throughout. To the characters you cant help but adore. To the wildly entertaining interactions between Bailey and Porter. To the lighter moments that include a case of mistaken identity, a museum heist, an embarrassing family tradition, an unhealthy love affair with churros. To the serious moments that include heartache, the end of a friendship, family tragedies, loss. And to the notable film quotes at the beginning of each chapter that hint at what is to come.

ALEX, APPROXIMATELY is an enchanting and enduring story, told from Baileys point of view and through her messaging with Alex, that spans the course of a summer with just a glimpse beyond. It offers substance and depth coupled with romance and humor. It has an easy flow that will make the pages fly. It is an insanely good read that is a definite must.

Eighteen-year-old, Bailey Rydell (known online as “Mink”) has just finished her junior year in high school. She is a classic film buff, to the point that she dyes and styles her hair in a Lana Turner, 1940’s, platinum-blond, shoulder-length, pageboy haircut, and wears vintage clothing from the 40’s and 50’s. For the past few months, Bailey has been messaging online, through a classic-film chatroom, with a fellow film geek she knows only as “Alex.” He has told her he is her age, and she is amazed to discover that he lives in the same town in California as her accountant father, who moved there from New Jersey several years ago after he and her mother divorced. In this day and age of “catfishing,” where strangers with suspect motives use fake identities to build relationships, especially romantic relationships, with other online users, Bailey rightly decides to exercise caution about arranging a meeting with Alex, and does not notify him that she has moved across the country to join her father. She decides to play detective using as clues tidbits of information Alex has given her about himself in order to track him down and check him out from a safe distance to determine if he is who and what he claims to be before she agrees to meet him.

Bailey’s father is a sweet, nerdy guy who is a loving and supportive parent. He lives in a cute bungalow, which has an actual redwood tree growing though its back porch. He offers Bailey an extremely thoughtful gift that she adores, a bright turquoise, classic Vespa scooter with a leopard-print seat that fits right in with her vintage fashion choices and is perfect for tooling around town, feeling like Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday.” As she searches for Alex, she simultaneously explores the quirky, and extremely scenic, fictional, Northern California beach town, Coronado Cove, which is a bustling tourist destination between San Francisco and Big Sur. It has 20,000 residents and, since the weather is great all year, at least twice that many tourists are constantly clogging up the town. They come for three main things: the redwood forest, a private nude beach, and great waves for surfing.

Bailey lands a summer job at a kooky local tourist trap called the Cavern Palace Museum. She makes friends there with a female coworker her age named Grace, and a nice old man who works as a guard. Unfortunately, the second guard, Porter Roth, who is also Bailey’s age, is a pain in the neck. He has been friends with Grace for years, but toward Bailey, he is so snarky, she often gets into heated exchanges with him. She refuses to put up with his many taunts that clearly indicate he thinks she’s some kind of prissy, stuck-up rich girl, which she absolutely is not. Porter is so completely different from Alex in personality, Bailey doesn’t consider for a moment that he might be Alex. But given the fact that Porter is a gorgeous, ripped surfer boy, Bailey is unwillingly attracted to him, in spite of his rudeness.

I call this type of plot, rather than “You’ve Got Mail,” a “Shop Around the Corner” (SATC) Plot,” because it was first used in the romantic-comedy movie, “The Shop Around the Corner,” in 1940. This plot appeared a second time in the film, “In the Good Old Summertime,” in 1949, and finally in the film, “You’ve Got Mail,” in 1998.

This is a difficult plot to pull off successfully, because it requires the audience to immediately suspend disbelief in an enormous coincidence, that the romantic protagonists could somehow become penpals and also accidentally run into each other in real life. (Technically it is a spoiler to say that Porter is Alex, but since the publisher, Simon Pulse, has included that crucial tidbit in the blurb describing the plot, I feel no qualms about including it here.) Realistically, the odds against a meeting like that happening are astronomical unless the two people involved have agreed, as penpals, to meet face to face and purposefully arrange a time and place for that meeting. Those of us who like this particular, tried-and-true plot, however, willingly suspend disbelief in the unlikely setup, because it is so much fun to experience the contrast between the terrific relationship the two protagonists have in their faceless correspondence compared to the sniping enmity between them in the real world.

This book is written in first-person point of view from Bailey’s perspective entirely, so we only get to know Porter through her eyes, which initially makes it somewhat difficult to like him because he is so undeservedly scornful toward Bailey. He does redeem himself fully later on, though, and it is a necessary requirement of the SATC plot that the romantic hero be a bit of a jerk toward the heroine, as described above.

This particular version of SATC is more of a dramedy than it is a comedy because there is a lot of tragedy in the personal backgrounds of both Bailey and Porter which has left each of them with issues of trust and some degree of PTSD. There is also some on-stage melodrama in this book in the form of a violent, teenage villain.

I love the setting of this story. Though Coronado Cove has a smaller population, it very much reminds me of Santa Cruz, where I lived years ago, with its boardwalk and beaches, gorgeous redwoods, and quaint atmosphere.

I also greatly enjoyed the surfing subplot. Porter’s family is filled with talented surfers, including Porter himself, his younger sister, his father, and his deceased paternal grandfather was legendary in the surfing world. Porter’s parents also own a surfing shop right on the beach.

The progress of the romantic relationship from enemies, to friends, to romance is very well done. Given that the two protagonists are 18 years old, making them legally of age, this book is geared a bit more toward a New Adult audience rather than young teens. Their relationship is “slow burn,” but it does eventually contain sex. However, this book retains a Young Adult feel in that there are no graphic descriptions of the sex. It is implied, rather than shown.

Neither Porter nor Bailey smoke, drink or do drugs, and there is no foul language in the book. But due to the violence of the villain and the implied sexual activity, I would personally deem this book’s content to be PG-13.

I rate this book as follows:

Heroine: 4 stars
Hero: 4 stars
Subcharacters: 4 stars
Romance Plot: 4 stars
Melodrama Plot: 3 stars
Setting: 5 stars
Writing: 4 stars
Overall: 4 stars

There was a lot to really like about this read – it is very easy to read for a start, and I read the whole book in only a day, so it’s pacey enough to keep you interested. There’s a lot of really rich detail, from the location it takes place to the museum where Bailey, Grace and Porter work, to the references to all the films they love. I think a movie buff could really adore that.

I also really liked the depiction of Bailey’s approach to intimacy and sex, balancing the shyness about approaching a first time with wanting sex and instigating intimacy in a way that wasn’t ashamed by those wants and needs – it’s a really healthy approach for the sort of audience this book is written for. It also has some great depictions of conversations with the love interest on what she’s willing/wanting to do, and the role model boyfriend response that you should get to that in a heterosexual relationship – again, healthy reading material for teenage girls thinking about how to approach sex with male partners. There’s also a broader consideration of trust and it does well at depicting male characters who experience a full range of emotion – both genders get to be strong.

The reason for the restriction to four stars is just that although the gender depictions are great for the main characters, the depictions of Grace, the black best friend, and another gay character felt tokenistic. Grace’s character was more developed and got a bit of a plot of her own but it felt a little like the author checking the boxes to cover representation in what remains a very mainstream Disney-esque white-girl sort of plot.

So overall, this is a really fun read with a lot of positives, particularly for your white heterosexual teenagers where it takes a great approach, but it’s not getting much more intersectional than that.

I really really enjoyed Bennetts first YA novel, Night Owls, so I was eager to read this one. However, it didnt quite live up to NO for me. I cant put my finger on why but here are a few things I thought about while reading:

– title: I didnt really get why the male name was used, nor the addition of approximately
– speediness of romance: it didnt seem very believable to me
– twist: saw it coming a mile off. It was not shocking or surprising at all.
– secondary characters didnt seem very three-dimensional
– sex scenes were totally cringey and I had to skim-read them

It was OK but nothing more, and I expected more after NO.

I have been a fan of Jenn Bennett’s books for several years now and don’t usually read much fiction classified as “young adult”, but Jenn’s latest two books have been a pleasant surprise. Lately it has taken me weeks to get through books (lack of free time…) but I devoured this one in just two days! An engrossing, amusing and sweet story that should appeal to anyone who likes their romance to be a bit smarter.

Really looking forward to what Jenn writes next!

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