Top Ten

Katie Cotugno

This novel was written in the form of a single top ten list, the top ten moments of high school for Ryan and Gabby. They tell their side of the story for all ten moments and slowly piece together their friendship as a whole. Gabby is a socially awkward, shy, and a slight outcast. She has anxiety and hates parties no matter how many she goes to. Ryan is a hockey player and jock who likes to party with the many friends in his popular circle. Nothing can break these two best friends apart. No matter how much they resent each other and no matter how different they are, they are friends forever.

This book was written very nicely with sweet lovable characters. However, it was hard to follow with the timelines of the chapters because one moment of the ten takes place in their senior year and the next in freshman year 3 years earlier so you have to pay attention and remember what has happened already before that year and what comes later. Also, you are only told about ten moments of their friendship, but then you don’t get a full backstory nor a full view of how their day to day friendship was. I would definitely recommend Top Ten but beware of the timeline jumping back and forth. Also, because of them only discussing ten moments of four years of friendship, it’s hard to connect Gabby and Ryan’s stories together. You don’t even hear about how they first met in detail until quite far into the book but it ends up coming out like ten short stories of these characters of these two friends that are polar-opposites. A bit different than other books I’ve read, but good for fans of cute love stories. – Zoe P.

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