Met all my expectations

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I first listened to the The Bright sessions in July of 2018, and was immediately hooked onto the series. It became a huge comfort for me and when I heard that there were to be books with the characters I had grown to love I was so excited. Winning a raffle for an early advanced reader copy was a dream come true, and I was so excited to read The Infinite Noise.

To begin, I was so excited to even see the cover, giving life to previously only audio-based characters is extremely cool, and I was really excited to see Caleb and Adam on the cover, instead of an object, or wordart, etc.

Opening the book I was immediately pulled into the story, seeing Caleb and Adam’s day to day life in school was very relatable to me, especially Adam’s. Shippen did a wonderful job of pulling the “hopeless nerd” trope with Adam, without making him seem one-dimensional. I enjoyed the split-perspective nature of the novel, and found it great to see inside of both of the boy’s thoughts. It’s an extremely believable book, and even with the science fiction elements, it feels more like a realistic fiction novel, and I think that’s wonderful.

The development of the relationship between Caleb and Adam is heartwarming. This book really is what I’ve been looking for in the whole “queer high school love story” genre. It doesn’t feel artificial or too edgy, nor does it feel too mushy. It’s just two boys falling in love. One thing that I loved was how their split was treated. One pet peeve of mine in fiction is the idea of falling in love once and that person being your soulmate forever, with barely any conflict that threatens the status of your relationship. It’s unrealsitic. Caleb and Adam go through something that affects them both deeply, and they split up for a bit, and school and life get in the way. It’s melancholy in the way that of course I was rooting for them to work out the first time, but I was very happy to see the realism in high school relationships. Having them voice their concerns when they got back together, and realistically outlined their relationship to one another was so refreshing. It’s just absolutely wonderful.

Shippen’s dialogue and description skills are fantastic. I knew she was great at writing dialogue due to the fact that podcasting relies on good dialogue, but description is a whole other ballpark. Using visual descriptions with podcast characters gave me the same happiness that having them on the cover gave me, I was so happy to be able to finally form accurate pictures of them in my mind. I think that the visual descriptions were the best part of the novel, and they stuck with me the most.

Overall, I adored this book, as I knew I would. I read it in one sitting on the day I recieved it and it didn’t disappoint at all. I’d recommend this to anyone wanting a realistic high school love story that actually is relatable to high schoolers, without sounding diminishing or completely missing the mark.