Dash and Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Reviewed by Tanuj B.
Grade 10

What do you enjoy doing at Christmastime? Opening presents? Visiting family members? Catching up with your friends? How about a scavenger hunt, conducted through a red notebook? Because when Dash finds a red notebook full of dares, he is drawn to the challenges it lists and the prospect of love it offers. As Dash and Lily trade their book of dares back and forth, both of them get the other to do things that he or she would never do.

Alone at Christmastime, Dash decides to spend his days at the Strand, a rather large bookstore, looking for, you guessed it, a nice book. But when he finds a red notebook lodged next to Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, filled with dares such as finding books titled Fat Hoochie Prom Queen, The Joys of Gay Sex, and other lesser known works, well, who could resist? He agrees to the challenge, and leaves a note with the cashier for the owner of the red notebook to find. In the meantime, Lily, also alone, is spending her Christmas cooped up at home, her parents in Fiji and her brother with his boyfriend. So she agrees when her brother makes up a way to get her a friend of the opposite sex and leaves the notebook at the Strand. She’s quite surprised when she finds someone takes her up on the dare and leaves one of their own. And so Dash and Lily start to trade their dares and their memories back and forth. Throughout the book, they visit places such as a wax museum, a mall, the movie theater, and a nightclub, and leave their comfort zones to make Muppets, break grandma’s boots out, and feel up a stranger at the mall.

The difference in the authors' style of writing each chapter is great to characterize Dash and Lily. Because the two authors wrote each chapter of the book independently and then sent the finished sample to the other author so that he or she could write the next one, Dash and Lily’s characters develop extremely well. Dash’s chapters seem to be filled with sarcasm and witty retorts, while Lily’s are filled with unreal threats, for the most part. Both of the authors seem to be going for humor to make the book interesting but do so in different ways, using irony and wit. For example, when Dash first finds the red notebook, and has to find Fat Hoochie Prom Queen, he resolves to ask the man behind the counter. He says something along the lines of, “I’m looking for Fat Hoochie Prom Queen.” Pause. “It’s a book, not a person.” When Lily is faced with a problem, while trying to find a solution, she sometimes threatens to do things that the reader would never imagine her to do. For example, she seems to want to use her parents’ guilt at making her do something she doesn’t want to do to get a puppy, or perhaps a bunny. It just makes her look ridiculous. These not only make the reader like the characters, it makes the characters like each other. To Lily, through his writings and her family’s descriptions, Dash seems like a snarling hipster that might wear purple often (which he is), while Lily is conveniently described as “the weird girl” by Dash (which she is).

I definitely, positively recommend this book. Not only does it illustrate an important theme (one that I and many other people too, I suspect, often have problems with), the characters are rich and funny, as is the conflict, the plot, and anything else about it. Will Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares result in two good friends, disappointment, or love? One thing’s for sure: I know I loved this book, and I’m quite sure you will too!

Also available in downloadable eBook form!