Top Ten
By: Katie Cutugno
Published Year: 2017
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Pages: 320
Summary (Provided by Goodreads): Ryan McCullough and Gabby Hart are the unlikeliest of friends. Introverted, anxious Gabby would rather do literally anything than go to a party. Ryan is a star hockey player who can get any girl he wants—and does, frequently. But against all odds, they became not only friends, but each other’s favorite person. Now, as they face high school graduation, they can’t help but take a moment to reminisce and, in their signature tradition, make a top ten list—counting down the top ten moments of their friendship:
10. Where to begin? Maybe the night we met.
9. Then there was our awkward phase.
8. When you were in love with me but never told me…
7. Those five months we stopped talking were the hardest of my life.
6. Through terrible fights…
5. And emotional makeups.
4. You were there for me when I got my heart broken.
3. …but at times, you were also the one breaking it.
2. Above all, you helped me make sense of the world.
1. Now, as we head off to college—how am I possibly going to live without you?
First Impressions
I recently went into the library for the first time in forever. Our library has a drive thru, so I typically place books I want on hold and pick it up there. Otherwise, I go inside for one book and walk out with like 7. When walking around this time, I spotted Top Ten by Katie Cutugno. I really liked Fireworks, so I immediately grabbed this one off the shelf.
What I thought
Gabby and Ryan have been best friends since freshman year. It is now the night of their high school graduation and they decide to talk about their top 10 moments of high school.
The book is broken up by each top ten moment. The moments are not in any order which can be a bit confusing. For example, I think number 9 is the first time they hang out, but then you find out that they had met previously. No information is given about that until I think number 3. And there are also times where, let’s say, number 8 is Spring of Junior year, and then number 7 is fall of Junior year. It can be a bit confusing to follow.
Gabby and Ryan’s friendship is a bit different. He is a varsity hockey player as a freshman, and she is an anxious loner (with one close friend). But for some reason, their friendship works. At the beginning, Ryan and Gabby hook up on graduation night. Not knowing anything about their past, I was rooting for them. But as their past got revealed, I just got a bit annoyed with them.
I didn’t quite understand why a lot of their top moments were top moments. To me, it shared a lot of bad moments from their friendships. While I’m sure they had great ones, otherwise they wouldn’t have been best friends, most moments involved them fighting, or not talking or misunderstanding each other. It made it a bit difficult to root for them to be together.
I think that Cutugno’s writing saved this story a bit. She did write it in a way that kept me intrigued and involved in their relationship/friendship, even if I didn’t like them much.
Unfortunately, I think this is my least favorite book of Cutugno’s. I liked the idea behind it and her writing was still enjoyable, but the story itself didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t much care for Gabby or Ryan and felt their friendship was a bit dysfunctional. The ending also felt like it came a bit abruptly. My friends and I always comment with endings like this by asking if the author had a page limit that they had to wrap up by, and this definitely felt like it. It’s not a bad book, but just not one of my favorites.