Book Review: Sean Griswold's Head by Lindsey Leavitt

Title: Sean Griswold's Head

Author: Lindsey Leavitt

Details: ARC, 288 pgs. (Published in Hardcover)

Published: March 1st, 2011 by Bloomsbury

isbn: 1599904985 (ISBN13: 9781599904986)

Reading Level: Young Adult

Source: Borrowed from Lori, though ended up getting my own copy.

Description: 

According to her guidance counselor, fifteen-year-old Payton Gritas needs a focus object—an item to concentrate her emotions on. It's supposed to be something inanimate, but Payton decides to use the thing she stares at during class: Sean Griswold's head. They've been linked since third grade (Griswold-Gritas—it's an alphabetical order thing), but she's never really known him.
The focus object is intended to help Payton deal with her father's newly diagnosed multiple sclerosis. And it's working. With the help of her boy-crazy best friend Jac, Payton starts stalking—er, focusing on—Sean Griswold . . . all of him! He's cute, he shares her Seinfeld obsession (nobody else gets it!) and he may have a secret or two of his own.
In this sweet story of first love, Lindsey Leavitt seamlessly balances heartfelt family moments, spot-on sarcastic humor, and a budding young romance.

My Thoughts:
What a fantastic story!  It wasn't really anything like what I expected, though I'm not exactly sure what I expected either.  I knew it was going to be funny and was wondering how the balance of funny and serious would work out.  Well, it worked out perfect.  And the funny was REALLY funny.  

The characters were awesome!  Quirky and so different!  The main character, Payton is kind of an anal retentive sort of person.  She has perfect grades, has her life color coded and pretty much everything in her life is put together in a way that's... organized, I guess.   But when she finds out her dad has MS she goes off the deep end.  She's furious at her parents and pretty much everything in her life starts to fall apart.  When her counselor tells her to pick a focus object she's in her element.  She's a whiz at charts, graphs, etc.  Only, her focus object isn't exactly an object... more like a head.  Sean Griswold's Head.  Now the parts that were super hilarious were her notes about him and his head.  And trust me, they are funny.  Just make sure you don't read those parts while putting a baby to sleep.  Or drinking, unless you like to snort it out your nose.  And it's actually kind of painful, so just be... cautious.  

Sean is so swoony (I'm borrowing Lori's words here, thanks Lori!).  He's just so different from any other male character that I've read.  He's not a bad boy.  He's an athlete but not a football player type of athlete.  And he's the kind of person that does things for other people because he's nice.  I'm afraid to say too much cause I don't want to give any spoilers, but I really love him.  Really.

This is the kind of book I can pass on to everyone I know.  My mom should enjoy it, my sister in laws should enjoy it.  My new copy will certainly be bedraggled before long because it's going on a long journey to many different households.  It's not often I find a book that I think everyone will like.  I highly recommend it!

You can find Lindsey Leavitt on her:

Website | Twitter 

Purchase:

Sean Griswold's Head at IndieBound
Sean Griswold's Head on Amazon