The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider

I can't even begin to describe how much I loved this book. It's everything I want Young Adult books to be. It's everything you hope a John Green novel could be except this surpasses expectations.

I love that this novel isn't your typical romance novel. I felt like I really could relate to both Cassidy and Ezra. The way this view the world is very different but both made sense to me. I have so many quotes from this book because there were so many important moments. Moments that made me think, and cry, and laugh out loud!

Schneider has this gift of building a really tender moment and filling it with love and then turning it around really fast and making you laugh hysterically. I will be reading everything she writes from now on.

The ending of this novel was perfect, in my opinion. This book itself has made it into my top five favorite books. I can't wait to see what Schneider's other books have in store for her readers. I'm excited to take the journey with her.

You can pick up this book, and you totally should, for $9.59.

Favorite Quotes:

• "That's everyone's life, no matter how unremarkable, has a moment when it will become extraordinary - a single encounter after which everything that really matters will happen."

• "I wasn't expecting her eyes - deep and disquieting and dark blue - the sort of eyes that made you wonder if the skies opened up when she got angry."

• "Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many."

• "The glow of the streetlight washed over her, and it struck me almost as an afterthought that she was beautiful. I don't know how I missed it those first few days, but I knew it then. Her hair was thrown back into a ponytail, with these copper-colored pieces framing her face. Her eyes shone with amusement, and her sweater slipped off one shoulder, revealing a purple bra strap. She was achingly effortless, and she would never, in a million years, choose me. But, for the next few minutes, I contented myself with the magnificent possibility that she might."

• "They rarely did anything besides recline in beach chairs and flick through magazines, and it baffled me how anyone could go to the beach to willingly engage in the same pass-the-time activities that passengers suffered through on airplanes."

• "I didn't know that she listened to her iPod in the kitchen while she made elaborate cookies and cupcakes from gourmet baking blogs, or that she thought it was bad luck to eat the batter."

• "I leaned in, closing the distance between us and knowing that I would get away with whatever I said next. 'I'm as serious as a car crash.'"

• "Because every time I closed my eyes, I pictured her nestled against me in that hotel bed, her legs soft and warm against mine, and out of all the things I wanted but knew I couldn't have, part of me hoped that Cassidy would be the one exception."

• "We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary - made-up prisoners in the hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to."

• "She tasted like buried treasure and swing sets and coffee. She tasted the way fireworks felt, like something you could get close to but never really have just for yourself."

• "I learned three things that night: 1) sharing a bed isn't nearly as intimate as making out in a too-small backseat, 2) inexplicably, some bras unhook in the front, and 3) Cassidy hadn't known I was Jewish."

• "'All of the girls wear tacky satin dresses covered in rhinestones, and all of the guys come up behind them and freak dance.' 'Freak dance?' Cassidy raised an eyebrow. 'You know, rub their junk on them trunks?' Toby explained in an attempt to be gangster that made me choke on my iced tea. 'Can we please do that?' Cassidy asked me. 'And you have to take me out to dinner somewhere awful, with unlimited breadsticks or a soda machine.'"

• "I pictured her tragically; it never once occurred to me to picture her as the tragedy."

• "Her chin jutted stubbornly and her eyes were a hurricane, and there was nowhere for me to seek cover."

• "I cried for my brokenness, for the way her words had crippled me, and for the three unspoken words I'd been carrying with me for a while now, and how quickly one of them had changed."

• "I thought about the metal in my knee, replacing this piece of me that was missing, that no longer worked. And it wasn't my heart, I kept telling myself. It wasn't my heart."

• "For a moment, I wondered if I should just tell her that she was a selfish, reckless girl who thought the world owed her something simply because she was pretty, and that I didn't want to be around when she discovered it didn't."

• "'Oh my god, why do you use such big words?"' she demanded in exasperation. 'Sorry,' I apologized, realizing she was the sort of girl who got upset when someone used an unfamiliar word, rather than learning what it meant."

• "They were filled with pictures of a world that reminded me of her, a place brimming with unknowable possibility and almost certain adventure."

• "But the brochures all seemed to blend together with the same promise of New England, and I realized that there's a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go."

• "Her expression was the one she'd worn a lot lately, full of this sadness that had lurked there for far longer than we'd been together."

• "'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamned wedding.'"

• "Cassidy studied the carpet for a long moment, and when she glanced up at me, a tropical storm was churning in her eyes."

• "'How much pee are we talking?' I asked, gathering my things. The girls sitting nearby gave me an odd look, which I supposed was justified."

• "I knew what it was like to have people stare at you with pity. For everyone's gaze to follow you through the hallways as though you were marked by tragedy and no longer belonged."

• "A snowman in a town where it didn't snow, made by a boy who couldn't wait to leave, and given to a girl who had never belonged."

• "And as much as I wanted to sound my tragic wail over the rooftops, and let go of the day, and crawl back toward that safe harbor, and give in to the dying of the light, and to do all of those unheroically injured things that people never write poems about."

• "'We move through each other's lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed.'"

• "To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing of everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her, because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our perfect imaginings."

• "I wondered what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable."

• "I can't say I forgive her for refusing to indulge the perhapsness of what we might have been, but I understand why she chose to do it, and she never asked for my forgiveness."

• "Because I made a decision that year, to start mattering in a way that had nothing to do with sports teams or plastic crowns, and the reality is, I might have made that decision without her, or if I'd never fallen in love with a girl who considered love to be the biggest disaster of all."

• "Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that's all. I don't know if he's right, but I do know that I spent a long time existing, and now, I intend to live."

• "'There's a word for it,' she told me, 'in French, for when you have a lingering impression of something having passed by. Sillage. I always think of it when a firework explodes and lights up the smoke from the ones before it.' 'That's a terrible word,' I teased, 'It's like an excuse for holding onto the past.' 'Well, I think it's beautiful. A word for remembering small moments destined to be lost.'"