Review: Down and Across by Arvin Ahmadi

Title: Down and Across
Author: Arvin Ahmadi
Publication Date: February 6, 2018 (Viking Books)
Format: Ebook - 330pgs
Rating: ★★★

Goodreads Page

Summary: 
Scott Ferdowsi has a track record of quitting. Writing the Great American Novel? Three chapters. His summer internship? One week. His best friends know exactly what they want to do with the rest of their lives, but Scott can hardly commit to a breakfast cereal, let alone a passion.

With college applications looming, Scott's parents pressure him to get serious and settle on a career path like engineering or medicine. Desperate for help, he sneaks off to Washington, DC, to seek guidance from a famous professor who specializes in grit, the psychology of success.

He never expects an adventure to unfold out of what was supposed to be a one-day visit. But that's what Scott gets when he meets Fiora Buchanan, a ballsy college student whose life ambition is to write crossword puzzles. When the bicycle she lends him gets Scott into a high-speed chase, he knows he's in for the ride of his life. Soon, Scott finds himself sneaking into bars, attempting to pick up girls at the National Zoo, and even giving the crossword thing a try--all while opening his eyes to fundamental truths about who he is and who he wants to be.

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The Basics: In Down and Across, our main character Scott is attempting to learn the secret to becoming a grittier person. He wants to use his grit to figure out what he wants to do with his life and why he has such a hard time sticking with things. Sure, this is an admiral goal and I'll admit, the synopsis had me intrigued. But, in my opinion, what sounded like such a strong idea suffered from a lackluster and unlikely plot, and poor side character development in a book that is mostly character driven.

I thought I was going to love this when I first heard about it. Once I started reading it though, I realized pretty early on that it would not be the five-star book I thought it'd be. Overall, it was just okay. It was quick and easy to read, and it's for mostly these reasons that I gave it three stars. But after every time I put the book down, I found that I had no desire to pick it back up. About 30% of the way through, I considered DNFing it because there were so many other books I was reading at the time that I was enjoying more.

The Pros:

• I really appreciated everything we learn about Iranian/Iranian-American culture. It isn't a background we see represented very often in mainstream contemporary YA, so I thought it was refreshing to be learning these new things as I read. 
• There is a mental health aspect to the story as one of the character's struggles with panic attacks, which I thought was handled well. The writing did not make light of the situation, and it had a very treatment-positive vibe.
• The story features a gay character. What I liked about the way this was handled is that when the character mentions he's gay, it isn't treated like a big reveal or plot twist. It's just mentioned in a this-is-what-it-is kind of way. I think this approach helps to normalize LGBT+ characters in stories where their sexuality isn't a significant theme, which I really appreciated.
• The ending wraps things up nicely. The potential love interest never fully becomes a love interest and the story doesn't end up being about this romance. 

The Cons: 

• The whole 17-year-old running away to DC with no problems thing felt forced. It seems incredibly unlikely that parents would leave their teenaged son home alone for weeks on end without anyone to regularly check up on him, or that he would be able to sneak away to another city to stay for several weeks. This idea didn't feel like it was written in a way that would allow me to suspend my disbelief enough to get into the story.
• My inability to suspend my disbelief also applies to the strangers turned friends aspect of the story. It didn't seem likely that Scott and Fiora would become semi-close friends the day they met or within a few days of meeting each other. 
• This particular criticism has nothing to do with the writing, but rather the actions of our main character. There's a scene where Scott is talking with a friend of Fiora's about her and her past. It really bothered me that Fiora's friend would tell so many personal details about her to someone she and he had both just met. While Scott is listening to the story of Fiora's life, he doesn't consider that maybe he should be hearing these details from her, or that she may not want him, a stranger, to know so much about her and her family. 
• This book doesn't have much of a plot to it. Normally this is something I wouldn't mind, but if a book has little to no plot, then it needs to be a well-written, character-driven story. The only character in this that feels fully realized is Scott. Everyone else in the story seems to just be half-made characters in the background of Scott's life and not characters who could be actual people. For example, Scott's best friends and parents are supposedly the most important people in his life, but they barely exist in the story and are only mentioned occasionally, which just felt really off.  
• Probably my biggest issue with this book is Fiora's character. In the first chapter of the book, Scott meets Fiora. This is a passage from this chapter - "I couldn't resist imaging my life as one of those coming-of-age movies⎯ and Fiora as the quirky, two-dimensional female character, written in solely to help me discover my full potential. The idea was nice. It smoothed over a good fifteen minutes of bumpy road time. But that wasn't Fiora's job." Even after explicitly stating that Fiora is not meant to be the 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' type character, that is exactly what she's reduced to throughout the story. Her only role in the story is to be the quirky girl that makes Scott's life more exciting. Even her backstory is only given as a half explanation as to why she's as quirky as she is, there's no other reason for her to be in the story, but to be what prompts Scott's unexpectedly adventurous summer. By the end of the book, her and Scott no longer even speak, and as far as anyone knows, she's just kind of disappeared. 

Recommended To: I would say if you enjoy awkward male characters and quirky female sorta love interests then this is the book for you. You may also like this if you enjoy reading about characters in transitory stages of their life or stories where the main character is feeling a little lost and struggles to find themselves.