Dash & Lily's Book of Dares (Netflix Series Tie-In Edition) (Dash & Lily Series)

For a YA romance book, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares really isn’t that romantic. I must admit though, it is very Christmassy. I’m so super glad I read it over the winter season, I think it gave the book an extra magical sort of touch. Christmas is a great holiday, and an awesome thing to write about because it’s something that so many people get involved in and it changes everybody’s mood. Both Dash and Lily, our protagonists who alternate POVs between the authors, have been left alone over the Christmas period for different family reasons. This leads Lily to leave a notebook in one of the biggest second-hand book stores in NYC. A notebook full of riddles and dares. Dash and Lily pass the notebook between them, daring them to do outrageous things but never actually meeting each other. Through just this little notebook, the pair get to know each other personally. Sounds romantic, right? Well, that’s what I thought. I thought this would be a super-cute, fluffy read to settle me into a real Christmassy mood, and while it did make me feel Christmassy, it didn’t make me feel gooey and angst-y with the power of a strong couple (in other words, for the geeks like me out there, a ship). Dash and Lily seem to have a lot of chemistry at first, but it seems to fizzle out pretty quickly. The dares aren’t really as crazy as it seemed to be - every dare was mildly embarrassing and/or tame. But the dares weren’t really what the book was about, despite being in the title. It was more about how Dash and Lily seemed to open up to each other through this notebook, and a great big build up to their meeting… BUT DAMMIT, COHN AND LEVITHAN! The meeting sucked. It felt like I was on the tip top of a roller-coaster, right before the dip, only to have it break down and have to be removed from the ride. It was so disappointing. Dash and Lily themselves as characters were as mild as the plot. Dash was overly pretentious, and for Christ’s sake, he wore a fedora. A fedora, people. Lily isn’t bad much herself, just the way that Cohn writes her makes her sound more like she’s 11 rather than being 16. Both of the characters made major effed-up choices somewhere a little past the middle of the book, and it really did make me feel frustrated proving that I did enjoy reading this because I was emotionally invested… But it wasn’t really enough, personally. With a book, I like to feel connected to the story and characters and in this, I just knew the ending would be happy in some way so I kinda stopped caring. The happy ending would be a good thing if the romance had at least had a tiny iota of chemistry… But, no. I really did enjoy the setting of this book - NYC is a personal favourite, although overdone, place of mine in books. It’s so beautiful, and normally it can be a bit cliché especially for romance novels to be set in NY, but with Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares it really worked well. It added to the great Christmas and New Year’s vibe you get from this book and made it more interesting to imagine in your head, too. Pacing in this book was a little slow, it took too much of a time for Dash and Lily to actually meet and there were some really needless plot additions that just felt like fillers to me. There were also a bumload of characters to try and keep up with - crazy amounts of relatives and names and blaaaah to remember about everything and everyone. But I suppose Christmas is a very family-themed time, so the abundance of characters does sit well. Overall, this book should totally be read in Christmas if you have the chance - but it’s probably not the best holiday themed read you can get out there!