The Distance from A to Z

by Natalie Blitt

January 12, 2016 · HarperTeen

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This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by Meagan M. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Best First Book, YA Romance category.

Here is Meagan M.'s review:

The first thing that you should know about this book is that it is YA romance, which I didn’t realize when I signed up for it since it was under the “best first book” category. Abby and Zeke’s ages are never actually given, although their French professor ensures they are both over 17 due to some explicit course content. It is difficult to review it because certain things that are hallmarks of YA don’t work for me.

The book opens on Abby having some sort of panic episode that is never referenced again. Instead her dorm roommate ends up being the one with a diagnosed anxiety disorder. I couldn’t understand why it was mentioned when she never has nervousness or anxiety that is outside of the average lovesick jitters ever again, but the opening paragraphs make quite a deal out of it. Anyway, Abby’s two brothers drop her off at a college where she is taking a summer long intensive French course, and the idea that her family is bananas crazy about baseball and the Cubs in particularly is hammered home, as her brothers want to watch the game, listen to the game, and drop her off in a hurry in order to find a sports bar to watch the next game.

This baseball theme runs through the entire book. Abby has latched onto French as something as far away from baseball as possible, so that she can put a wall between her family and herself, an interest that’s only hers, and one that she hopes will be her ticket to actually leaving the USA and going to study abroad in Paris.

Abby ends up meeting Zeke, and since he is dressed head-to-toe in baseball themed clothing, she assumes that he’s into baseball and even though he is showing an interest in her, she tries to squash it at every opportunity. Of course, he is the only other high school student taking the same intensive French course and the professor asks if they will partner up for the duration since she wants to avoid weirdness between pairing a high school student and a college student, particularly when there are NC-17 movies in the syllabus.

The whole baseball thing in general didn’t work for me. I can understand that Abby would be frustrated and feel neglected by her family and want to pursue other interests. But we get the picture that Abby used to love baseball too, until something happened, but the book never tells us exactly what. There are a few hints that her previous boyfriends were only interested because of the family’s season tickets or something, but that hardly seems like enough for her to completely want to remove all baseball from her life. I kept waiting for a huge reveal and it never came. Instead, Abby just decided one day to hate baseball and she’s stuck with it. It didn’t seem like enough of an obstacle to keep two people apart.

Part of the writing style of this book includes AN INCREDIBLE AMOUNT of French interjections and translations mid-text. I can read French so this was annoying to me in a different way – the text was very repetitive. But for non-French speakers, I could see it be annoying in another way, as lots of French you don’t understand breaking up the flow of the book. And when I say a lot, there is quite a bit.

There were two points in the book that I didn’t like at all. First, there was some girl-on-girl slut shaming that I don’t appreciate seeing in any book, and while the narrative does try to backpedal later, but the earlier comments are never apologized for. Zeke is apparently hot stuff and has a lot of female admirers on campus, and Abby frequently looks down on these girls for showing too much skin. In the third chapter, she thinks:

Her smile is wide, her chin coming down almost to her shoulder as she plays shy. I’m sorry, but nobody whose behind is sticking that far out from their shorts, whose tank top is that low-cut, is shy.

Later on, in chapter 13, she thinks:

There’s something about the fact that I’d believed they were taking Introduction to Basket Weaving that has me feeling like a terrible person. A terrible, judgey person who believes that women who have unblemished skin and short skirts are somehow less capable.

And then, along with that, there’s a scene that narrowly escapes being a date rape scene. She’s rescued by a friend of hers before any assault can take place, but it’s never ever referenced again. But she’s clearly being given alcohol and marijuana despite being only 17 or 18, and a guy continually puts his hand up her skirt even though she keeps pushing him away. It bothered me how normalized the scene was, and almost played for humor as Abby is a drunken, blabbering mess, mistakenly telling Zeke all of her secret feelings while she’s under the influence.

This book doesn’t have any sexy times. They talk about maybe going “all the way” but they never do. They don’t even go to second base (pun intended). The HEA is more of a HFN, as they are only 17+ and there’s no forever commitment alluded to. The central conflict about hating baseball for no real reason and that including anyone else that plays or enjoys baseball made it very hard for to relate to. This is the disconnect for me, since I don’t really see it as a big deal. I kept wondering if maybe baseball had turned her parents into drug addicts or something, but it was just that she didn’t like how preoccupied her family was over it, which evidently meant that she had to completely excise it from her life.This book did not work for me. It didn’t have anything particularly special and the conflict was overblown.