Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

“I always think of each night as a song.  But now I’m seeing we don’t live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord.  There is no ending here.  It’s an infinite playlist.”

This is one of the rare books that I read after seeing the movie instead of the other way around.  I loved the movie (so much so we named our first dog Norah), the quirkiness and excitement of a night of adventures.  But the two are VERY different.  In the movie, Norah and Nick spend their night trying to find Norah’s lost friend Caroline and hunting down a secret concert for their favorite band, Where’s Fluffy?  The book focuses more on Nick and Norah’s budding romance and pushing past their current situations to see a future together.

Nick, the bassist in a band with his two gay best friends, sees his evil-ex Tris at his band’s latest concert.  Nick freezes and asks the random girl next to him to be his seven minute girlfriend to make Tris jealous.  Enter Norah, the random girl next to him who also happens to know Tris from school and her ways of leaving heartbroken boys in her wake.  Norah’s also going through an on-again-off-again relationship with her evil-ex Tal, but she enthusiastically agrees to be his seven-minute girlfriend.  Little do they know this is just the start of their whirlwind night, full of singing nuns, broken down cars, stale Oreos, and mending hearts.

The best thing about this book is the feelings behind it.  It shows how everyone is broken in ways others may not see, but we still deserve love and happiness.  There are so many great quotes from this book, from both Rachel Cohn (who wrote Norah’s chapters) and David Levithan (who wrote Nick’s chapters).  It is just a great story about healing and learning to move forward after life tries to knock you down.

Just be aware, this is a young adult book, but there’s lots of language (f-words all over the place) and some sexual innuendos. In my opinion it doesn’t take away from the story, but it does make it more appropriate for older teens.