Review: Tonight the Streets Are Ours by Leila Sales

Title: Tonight the Streets Are Ours
Author: Leila Sales
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Release date: September 15th 2015
Source: Netgalley
Format: eARC

Rating: 3.5/5

Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository

Recklessly loyal.

That’s how seventeen-year-old Arden Huntley has always thought of herself. Caring for her loved ones is what gives Arden purpose in her life and makes her feel like she matters. But lately she’s grown resentful of everyone—including her needy best friend and her absent mom—taking her loyalty for granted.

Then Arden stumbles upon a website called Tonight the Streets Are Ours, the musings of a young New York City writer named Peter, who gives voice to feelings that Arden has never known how to express. He seems to get her in a way that no one else does, and he hasn’t even met her.

Until Arden sets out on a road trip to find him.

During one crazy night out in New York City filled with parties, dancing, and music—the type of night when anything can happen, and nearly everything does—Arden discovers that Peter isn’t exactly who she thought he was. And maybe she isn’t exactly who she thought she was, either.

Tonight the Streets Are Ours is a coming of age contemporary novel about the growth and self discovery of the main character.

Like all stories, the one you're about to read is a love story.
If it wasn't, what would be the point?

And it´s a love story but just not the typical one.

Arden is a seventeen-year-old girl that has always puts the welfare of others before herself, regardless of the consequences she always puts the needs of others before hers, and Lindsey her best friend since she was a little girl, is the one that constantly benefits from this.

But one day that Arden is with low morale she searches Internet on why nobody loves me as much as I love them? and that search leads her to find the blog/journal of Peter, a young man living in New York and in one of his entries he ask himself exactly the same question and this leads Arden to follow his blog and start reading from the beginning, the everyday life of Peter and his romance with the beautiful Bianca, as some of the things he does to gain the attention of Bianca. Meanwhile Arden dreams/wishes that her romance with her boyfriend Chris was like theirs. Arden follows the blog for several months and the day she has a disagreement with her boyfriend Chris, on Peter´s blog she reads that Bianca broke up with him, which prompts Arden on a spur of the moment to do a road trip along with Lindsey to New York with the intention to find Peter.

And it is on that night in New York, so different from what she is used to, Arden makes decisions and do things that she normally would not do and ends up discovering another side of the people around her and herself,

The beginning of Tonight the Streets Are Ours is slow paced, as we get to know Arden first, her friends, her boyfriend, family and that she´s not completely happy as she seems, but is not until her trip to New York that the plot begins take pace and managed to captivate my attention, it´s a little different than I expected, but I did liked it.