Title: Life in Outer Space
Author: Melissa Keil
Rating Out of 5: 5 (I will read this again and again and again)
My Bookshelves: Contemporary, Contemporary romance, Easy reading, Young adult
Dates read: 14th – 15th July 2019
Pace: Medium
Format: Novel
Publisher: Hardie Grant Egmont
Year: 2013
5th sentence, 74th page: I unpack my bag and stack my books in order of size.

Sam Kinnison is a greek, and he’s totally fine with that. He has his horror movies, his nerdy friends, World of Warcraft – and until Princess Leia truns up in his bedroom, he doesn’t have to worry about girls.

Then Sam meets Camilla. She’s beautiful, friendly and completely irrelevant to his life. Sam is determined to ignore her, except that Camilla has a life of her own – and she’s decided that he’s going to be part of it.

Sam believes that everything he needs to know he can learn from the movies… but now it looks like he’s been watching the wrong ones.

I have been hanging out for this book to arrive in the post. And then it did. When I had about 1,000 things to do… so it took me an extra week to open it and sink my teeth into it. But then I did. And I was deliriously grateful for the awesomeness that I am beginning to associate with Melissa Keil. It kind of helped that I was down sick when I finally got to read this, so the feel good, sweet storyline made me feel a heck of a lot better. And actually made me smile… which I hadn’t really been doing on account of you know… sick.

Most of the books I read feature a strong, independent woman. Which this one does. But they also tend to be written either from their point of view, or something very close to it. There are very few books that I have read in recent years which are written from the point of view of the boy. And now I’m kind of wondering why this is missing so much from my shelves and reading. I absolutely loved the change of pace and the different POV. Not only was it a nice change, but it worked brilliantly well, and I can’t imagine it being so engaging having been written from Camilla’s viewpoint.

Although I tend to watch a lot of TV, I’m not what I would consider a movie buff by any shape of the imagination. Yet, the movie quotes and references that were peppered throughout this story still worked really well. They were obscure enough that it wasn’t repetitive and frustrating, but also obvious enough that I picked up on many of the aspects and things that they were talking about. The fact that Sam is so obsessed with horror also made me pick up a horror book not long after finishing this, simply because I felt intrigued by the genre.

Boy meets girl and falls madly in love stories, especially in YA can feel incredibly contrived. As an adult, I know that there are very few people who met someone when they were fifteen and stayed with them forever. And the few who did had to work at it. It’s not that roses and rainbows feeling that a lot of books and TV shows like to emphasise. This story isn’t like that, it’s realistic. Yes, it’s still got a love at first sight feel. And the entire book you want to smack them both over the head because your pretty sure they’re meant to be together forever. BUT. Most of the story and relationship is about creating a friendship. About supporting one another through tough times and truly getting to know one another. To me, that is what makes this such a great romance. It’s a love built on friendship and trust, one that is so cute and supportive. ❤

Image source: Goodreads