This book is a 2006 Cybil Award Nominee for YA Fiction.
“Fuse: lit.
“Fuse: burning.
“Ready.
“Set.
“Explode.”
Five minutes would be all it would take for Nick to avoid seeing Tris see him seeing her. At least, that’s all he thinks it’ll take, and what’s more, he’s not looking much further ahead than that. There’s a girl sitting at the bar, wearing a flannel shirt, and when he asks her to be his girlfriend for five minutes — he’s not looking much further ahead than that.
Norah sees that whipped look in his eyes. This guy must be another one of Tris’ victims, and she knows Tris’s ways all too well. All Norah really needs is somebody with wheels to take Caroline — drunk, and getting ready to run into another wall with yet another punk rock bandmate — home, and off her hands. So, she says yes to that five minutes, pulling Nick’s head down to block her view of Caroline making a fool of herself — again.
Myriad motives abound, but just one intense kiss — pouf! — changes both Nick and Norah’s world. Well, okay: one kiss, one all-nighter filled with jags of talk and near-bouts of tears, one kiss and maybe one more and a little more, one kiss and a night of loud, loud music, expletives, love between friends, Playboygirl Bunnies, random clubs, dead cars, borscht, and spontaneous, painful honesty. Set against the backdrop of the pulsatingly all-night-live city of New York, told in alternating voices, this one night is sometimes magical, sometimes maddening; filled with some 80’s references that may miss with some young readers, but a fast-paced, attention-getting, whirlwind only-in-fiction love story. Even the title sounds like a movie: Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist: a fast-talking, fractured, witty, wish-fullfillment romance.
