Disclaimer: I'm a romantic and the plot of this book hit really close to home. I set myself up to love this book (I love the author, I love the illustrator, I practically tackled Mickie when she got the ARC), and I did indeed love it. I get why people found Min annoying, but I identified with her a lot. Sure, there were lots of signs that she and Ed weren't a good match, but I saw the story as a unique angle on the coming-of-age process: Min coming to terms with looking at things in a real way. She was (don't say it) "artsy": she could see the beauty in a bonfire even though she hated the drunken jocks and mean girls around it. She felt the rush of being at a basketball game even though she also felt bored and out of place. She could see the sweetness and potential in Ed even though they were almost different species. Maybe this is why I identify with her, because I think this ability is both a blessing and a curse. If you can always find a silver lining, do you forget that you can hold out for things that are silver-all-over from the get-go? Are silver linings/rose-colored glasses ever "enough" when it comes to big things like relationships? Perhaps adulthood hits when you realize the answer is no. (Heh, maybe I'm not yet an adult, then...) 
 Kudos to Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket for writing in the voice of a girl. Somewhere I need to start keeping a list of authors who write in the other gender. It intrigues me. 
 Favorite quotes: 
 "...and Ed, the thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up. Like a tie at a tag sale, some perfect thing in a crate of nothing, you were just there, uninvited, and now suddenly the party was over and you were all I wanted, the best gift." 
 "And then the third night [of lighting matches] was after we broke up, which was worth a million matches but instead just took all I had." 
 "I was stupid, the official descriptive phrase for happy." 
 p. 80-82 description of school -- whoa 
 "Oh, wherever it works, Ed, I thought with your hand on my hip and the not-fitting coin in my pocket. Wherever it's good, whatever strange faraway land, let's go there, let's stay in that place alone." 
 "...there was something wrong with the picture I was in. It was like an apple running for Congress, a bike rack wearing a bathing suit. I was cut and pasted wrong into a background you could immediately -- or, anyway, after fifteen minutes -- see didn't match up, was how I felt." 
 "'Okaaay,' Jillian said, with that weird curve she uses in her voice sometimes, airy but spiky like a bug-eating plant." 
 "...when I close this book to give it to you, I don't think about that, just us holding the book in our hands to buy it and take it here with us, because damn it Ed, that's not why we broke up. I love it, I miss it, I hate to give it back to you, this complicated thing, it's why we stayed together." 
 "'It tastes like somebody killed a spicy fig.'" 
 "Al said that one should have been called Are You in a Good Mood? We'll Fix That: The Movie." 
 "The chicken is saying pretty much the short version of this whole letter to you: ?#!* Ouch!" 
 "How wrong to think I was anyone else, like thinking grass stains make you a beautiful view, like getting kissed makes you kissable, like feeling warm makes you coffee, like liking movies makes you a director. How utterly incorrect to think it any other way, a box of crap is treasures, a boy smiling means it, a gentle moment is a life improved. It's not, it isn't, catastrophic to think so, a pudgy toddler in a living room dreaming of ballerinas, a girl in bed star-eyed over Never by Candlelight, a nut thinking she is loved following a stranger in the street."