Read Bottom Up by Neel Shah and Skye Chatham 5/5 stars

Hey, guys!  So, I just finished reading Read Bottom Up by Neel Shah and Skye Chatham.  It was amazing!  However, I must warn you, it is a "letter-book" (more on that later) and it is not aimed at kids/teens like many books on my blog, so there is a bit of mild adult content.  If you are in high school, like me, you are definitely fine, but if you are like ten, maybe not?

Anyway, the cover:

The Cover:

The cover shows our couple, Madeline and Elliot talking at some restaurant.  Its not a particular scene in the book, but it kinda works for this book.  The title is very creative, too.  "Read bottom up" is something that Madeline wrote when she forwarded her best friend one of Eliot's emails.  She was supposed to start at the bottom of the conversation and read it up.  It also seems very metaphoric, but I'm not going to get into that right now.

Official Description:
A charming novel about falling in love, or like, in the digital age, told in an inventive, creative style.
Madeline and Elliot meet at a New York City food event. Flirtation, online, ensues. A romance, potentially eternal, possibly doomed, begins.
And, like most things in life today, their early exchanges are very public, available to be scrutinized and interpreted by well-intentioned friends (aka amateur love doctors) who are a mere click away. Of course like all good email trails, this one reads from the bottom up.
Madeline and Elliot's relationship unfolds through a series of thrilling, confounding, and funny exchanges with each other and with their best friends. The result is a brand new kind of modern romantic comedy, both in format and in content. Read Bottom Up is a brilliant, fresh portrait that captures how enchanting, exciting, and downright confusing falling in love twenty-first-century style can be.

My Condensed Description:

Elliot and Madeline meet at the restaurant that Elliot works at and they start spending a lot of time together.  They share all of their romantic hopes/dreams/conversations in emails (and a few text messages) between themselves and their two friends, David and Emily.  The relationship is cute at times and doomed at others.

My Review:
This book was great! If I had to pick one word, I would call it "realistic" because it has none of the dramatic fanfare that fictional relationships sometimes have.  Madeline over analyzed everything that Elliot said, they were noncommittal, it was awkward at times, and most importantly, it wasn't perfect. There were constant snags and irritations in their relationship.  This made it really interesting to me.
The characters were also really three dimensional.  Even David and Emily, the best friend characters, were developed and unique.  They were not many characters because of the way that this novel was written, but each character that did exist was treated, if not equally, than well.
So. The writing style.  It was different. It took me a few pages to understand the way it was written and easily read the book, but it worked.  After I understood how to read it, I had no trouble at all getting into the story.  Don't let its difference push you away.  Basically, there were just a lot of emails back and forth to the four main characters of this cast (Elliot, Madeline, Emily, and David).  It was actually a great way to write this particular story, and it made it much more enjoyable to me.  One reason was that we had multiple character's points of view.  For example, Madeline would describe a situation as awful and terribly awkward, while Elliot would think it went well.  There were just so many little inconsistencies between their stories (he was 3 minutes vs 2 hours late) that it made each situation full of doubt and humor.  I normally don't like "letter-books" but this book made these modern-day "letters" work!
It was also surprisingly deep, as well as sort of romantic-comedy-esque. The messages sent were what actual people would send in these situations.
My only real complaints were that the formatting for the text messages (which happened only a few times throughout the book) was off.  This was almost certainly because I was reading an uncorrected ARC, but it was a little irritating.  I am 99% sure it will be fixed by the time you guys read it.  Also, the fact that the characters were expected to respond instantly to emails irked me.  Now, keep in mind that I am a teenager, and I find that we rarely email/check our emails.  I know that the characters in this novel were NOT teenagers, so it might be different for them, but I was a little skeptical about that.
All in all, it was a great book.  It was cute, deep, interesting, and just a quick read in general.  I'd strongly recommend reading it!

Quotes (NOTE: These may change in the official published edition!) :

"did not go home with her. I mean I did walk her back to her apartment, tell her I'm still madly in love with her, and offer to stay over (just spoon) and do her laundry in the morning... but she said no to everything, so all good. Except the laundry part. She did let me come in and do that."

"Well, there's also that adage about not buying the cow if you can get the milk for free but WHAT IF YOU'RE LACTOSE INTOLERANT"

"Conclusion: he is the dead cat of my dreams"

"Do you want me to start with the part where she called me 'an emotional vegetable'" ....
"the part where she said that I was more interested in being 'in a school play about a relationship than in real intimacy'"  ....
"Or when she accused me of using her to get a cookbook deal?"

This book comes out April 7, 2015.

Happy Reading!