The Year of Secret Assignments by Jaclyn Moriarty

[description from B&N]

The Ashbury-Brookfield pen pal program is designed to bring together the two rival schools in a spirit of harmony and "the Joy of the Envelope." But when Cassie, Lydia, and Emily send their first letters to Matthew, Charlie, and Sebastian, things don't go quite as planned. What starts out as a simple letter exchange soon leads to secret missions, false alarms, lock picking, mistaken identities, and an all-out war between the schools--not to mention some really excellent kissing.

Review:

That's a horrible summary for this book. It doesn't say anything about how this book is written entirely in letters and Notebook and entries and it makes it sound like some cheesy spy book (at least that's how it seems to me). It also doesn't mention how completely awesome this book is.

I really didn't have any expectations going into this one. I heard it was good, but I wasn't expecting to be blown away by its sheer awesome and smartness. As I mentioned earlier, the book is written entirely in letters, diary entries, bulletins and with something called the Notebook. (There should be a trademark symbol after "Notebook," but I dunno how to make one and don't want to find one to copy.) I didn't think this was going to work out very well since the letters and stuff are all from different points of views- a total of 8 characters tell the story at one point or another, I believe. But I was happy that having all the different points of view allowed me to see each character from a bunch of perspectives to see what they are like to everyone else. This really helped make them believable characters since the characters weren't looked at the same way by everyone, including the character being observed. Seeing what others thought of a character made it easier for me to perceive the character in my own way, like I was actually a character in the book watching the person.

In the beginning, the characters' voices were very similar and not very distinguishable. They were all most sarcastic and funny, but as time went on and the characters revealed all their feelings and problems, they gained their own voices and identities.

It was also interesting to only hear about the events going on instead of seeing them as they happened. The events were recollected by all the narrators and they commented on the events, which really helped make things more amusing than they already were, since almost all the characters were funny.

So yeah, I really loved this one. It starts out really light, but soon grows a little more dramatic (but still light and smart) with a Big Reveal that occurs. The drama definitely made me want to keep reading the book, even though I kind of predicted what happened.

9/10