The Seven Torments of Amy and Craig (A Love Story)

September 10, 2018
Craig, 17, a D&D master ready to get out of his small town, doesn’t expect that way-out-of-his-league Amy, 18, would ever give him a second look (“Amy Carlson was no ordinary hot chick. She was president of everything”). But after Craig joins Youth in Government at the Janesville, Wis., YMCA, which Amy presides over, they fall in love. Chronicling their senior-year relationship in a nonlinear fashion through the unhappy break-ups and the make-ups, debut novelist Zolidis reveals the complicated nature of first love mixed with a healthy dose of complicated family life. Craig’s inferiority complex (“It’s kind of awful having a twin sister who’s a hundred times cooler than you”) informs his relationship; Amy, meanwhile, struggles with her own identity crisis, looking for her birth mother, and dealing with a parent undergoing cancer treatments. Paying light homage to John Hughes movies via a mid-’90s setting, Zolidis handles the on-and-off relationship with humor and heart while deftly weaving through the more difficult subject matter. Ages 14–up. Agent: John Cusick, Folio Jr./Folio Literary Management.

August 1, 2018

Gr 9 Up-Readers are warned in the first pages of playwright Zolidis's YA debut that the couple doesn't end up together. Instead, Craig and Amy, who are dating in small-town Janesville, WI, in the mid-1990s, break up and get back together repetitively. The out-of-sequence breakups offer a slow-drip reveal of their problems and incompatibilities, much like Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman's Why We Broke Up. Craig is a nerdy writer who plays Dungeons and Dragons and semi-ironically idolizes Dostoyevsky, while Amy is the overachieving but insecure student body president. They meet at Youth in Government, where Craig advances comically bad legislation in desperate bids for her attention. But by the time they get together, teens already know that their love story is doomed. The story is appealingly realistic-Craig and Amy have traits that simultaneously draw them together and tear them apart. The cringe-inducing awkwardness of the first few breakups get things off to a somewhat slow start, but the book's climax offers an unexpectedly poignant and well-rounded look at the differences between being loved and being understood. Full of self-referential moments in which the author instructs readers where to flip to find the sex, and chapter titles like "How I Screwed This Up," it is also outrageously funny, with laugh-out-loud anecdotes (a hunting trip is particularly well done) in every chapter and snappy dialogue throughout. VERDICT Full of humor and heart, this refreshingly unromantic romance is highly recommended for most collections.-Elizabeth Giles, Lubuto Library Partners, Zambia

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2018
Two high school seniors weather a stormy year.The last person Craig thought he'd be going out with is Amy Carlson, the Youth in Government president whose bright future seems to be a given. Craig hasn't thought much of his future, aside from a desire to be as far away and completely different from his parents and twin sister as possible. Regardless, circumstances intervene, and Amy and Craig begin to date...then break up...then date again...and then break up again. Over the course of a turbulent school year the lovebirds flit in and out of each other's lives. Zolidis (White Buffalo: A Play in Two Acts, 2014, etc.), a playwright making his novel debut, splinters and shuffles the narrative, hopping around in time so we see a couple of breakups before we ever see Craig and Amy get together. This technique takes a few pages to get used to, but Craig's blistering humor and reluctant optimism are so endearing that readers will settle into the groove of things. Told through Craig's perspective, Amy's character isn't fully fleshed out till later in the text. Laudably, these developments spring organically from the narrative. There's nothing startlingly fresh here, but there's something to be said for a good example of the genre, and this title certainly fills the bill. Amy and Craig are white; there is some diversity in secondary characters.A charming, funny love story. (Romance. 13-17)

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September 15, 2018
Grades 9-12 Craig doesn't have a whole lot going for him. He's not popular or athletic like his track-star twin sister?he spends most of his time playing Dungeons and Dragons with his friends?and he lives in Janesville, Wisconsin, where it can be hellishly cold three seasons of the year. There is one good thing, though, and that's Amy Carlson: beautiful, high-achieving Amy, who, unbelievably, wants to date Craig. Well, sometimes. When she isn't breaking up with him. Which is something she does a lot. It's 1994, and over the course of their senior year, Amy and Craig navigate the highs and lows of the end of high school, the possibility of college, difficulties in their home lives, and the roller coaster of their on-again, off-again relationship. Craig's dryly witty narration adds humor to a story that can be bleak at times, and the nonlinear narration keeps things interesting. A coming-of-age romance with bittersweet tones for fans of John Green-style jocularity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2019
High-school senior Craig doesn't know much about the world, but he knows he's desperately in love with Amy--enough to keep pursuing her after each of their many breakups (recounted nonsequentially throughout the novel). Everything Craig does to impress Amy ultimately helps him learn about the person he wants to be. This coming-of-age story's 1990s-Wisconsin setting is believably and vividly rendered.

(Copyright 2019 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)