ROAD TRIP ROM COM: HERE WE GO AGAIN

I absolutely love road trips.  I am happy to get in the car and drive 13 to 14 hours to go and visit my daughter and granddaughter in Indiana.  I’m pretty happy to get in a car and drive almost anywhere.  And I also love good books about road trips, like The Mostly True Adventures of Tanner and Louise, and everyone knows I love a good romantic comedy.  So when you have a romantic comedy about a road trip, you’re in my sweet spot, which is why I loved Here We Go Again, by Alison Cochrun, so much.

Actually, there’s a lot to love about this book.  It’s funny, it’s charming, it’s moving and in many ways it’s surprising (all good ways, I might add).  The characters are lovable (for the most part; there are some you’re not supposed to love, and that’s fine, too), the plot moves right along, and there are none of those rom com cliches (especially about how the couple breaks up and finds their way back together) that annoy me so much. It even starts with a couple of very funny (and painful) disasters to introduce our main characters (I always like a rom com that starts out with a funny scene).

Logan and Rosemary are both teachers at the local high school.  They are also enemies.  Once upon a time, when they were growing up in the town where they’re both now working, they were the closest of friends, and on the verge of becoming more than friends when everything blew up for them.  When they were both in high school, they took English classes from Joe Delgado, a legendary teacher who saw the strengths in each of them even when they were loudly opposed to each other.  Joe was gay and out, and his acceptance of his own sexual identity made it easier for each of the girls to admit to her own queerness. 

But now Joe is dying of cancer, and he asks both Logan and Rosemary to take him on one last road trip, to a cabin he owns on Mount Desert Island in Maine (they’re starting out in Washington State).  Though neither one wants to spend a lot of time in a car together, they both feel such an obligation to Joe that they agree to do it. And off they go, on a cross-country adventure that takes up most of the book.

There are some things you know from the outset: Joe is going to die by the end of the book (this isn’t the kind of book that has a miraculous recovery), and Logan and Rosemary are going to end up together by the end of the book. 

The fun of the book is watching how Logan and Rosemary get together, and discovering both new things about Joe (including the love of his life), and wonderful things about America.  I’m a little bummed that their trip up the east coast is covered in a page or so, though I understand why it happened that way.  On the other hand, their side trip to the Grand Canyon, their overnight stay in Idaho (which turns out to be surprising) and their sojourn in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, are wonderful, making me want to travel to all those places and experience them for myself.

There’s sadness in this book, of course – I did mention that Joe’s dying, didn’t I? – but it’s a romantic comedy and so yes, there’s a happy ending, a soul-satisfying happy ending for all the characters you’ve come to care about.

The next best thing to a road trip is a great road trip book.  Here We Go Again definitely qualifies.

HAPPY EVER AFTER ON SKIS: FOUR WEDDINGS AND A PUPPY

You’ve got to love a book that opens with a scene in which an out of control (but goodhearted) golden retriever is running head on toward an elaborate wedding cake with destruction on his mind, and the main character rushes to stop the dog from destroying the cake and the whole wedding.  Not only dramatic, but funny, and a great introduction to the main characters, Kendall (a wedding planner, not necessarily by choice) and Brody, the hunk who intercepts the dog moments before he destroys the cake and any chances Kendall has of establishing her family’s resort as a wedding destination.  Four Weddings and a Puppy, by Lizzie Shane, gets points from me for a great opening scene.  And, unlike some rom coms which start with great funny characters misbehaving and then forget about the funny characters for most of the book, in this one the dog, Banner (whom Kendall is “fostering”, though you know from the outset that she’s going to end up keeping him), repeatedly appears and causes havoc of one kind or another.

Kendall and Brody have known each other their whole lives.  They practically grew up together on this mountain in Vermont where Kendall’s family has been running a ski resort for generations.  Kendall was always the daredevil of the two, constantly challenging Brody to ski faster and better, and even though he was her brother’s best friend, Kendall always had a crush on Brody, which she never acted on.

The two of them both became Olympic-hopeful skiers, until a tragic accident ended Kendall’s career.  Brody, by contrast, has continued his quest for gold, winning all kinds of medals in the meantime and becoming something of a minor god in the world of ski aficionados. Kendall has watched his exploits from afar, while she struggles to keep her family’s resort going after her father (her first coach) spent a ridiculous amount of money on her medical bills and physical therapy after the accident.  She feels she owes her father a debt she can’t repay, which is why she’s working so hard even though running a resort and especially doing wedding planning for people at the resort, is not her forte at all.

Brody appears at the first of the four weddings in the book (and no, in case you’re wondering, the fourth is NOT Brody and Kendall’s), that of his cousin, where he is fortuitously placed to intercept Banner and save the day.  What he hasn’t told anyone is that he’s dropped out of the world of Olympic skiing with a dumb excuse about his knee, and he has no idea what he’s going to do with his life, beyond wanting to prove to his family and friends that he isn’t married to skiing and he can be relied upon.

One of the things I like about this book is the way the two main characters are struggling with something other than their attraction to each other (though of course they are attracted to each other however much they may try to pretend otherwise).  Kendall has issues of grief and guilt and loss to deal with, facing the death of her dreams of what her life would be like, which is especially difficult when she sees Brody, who, as far as she knows, is living her dream.  Brody is dealing with an early mid-life crisis – maybe it’s a mid-career crisis – where he looks at everything he’s been doing and realizes that none of it matters that much to him anymore, and now he has to come up with a self-image that’s not built on his success as a skier.  They both have family expectations to confront, and it takes each of them a while to do that (Kendall’s comes practically at the end of the book, in fact), and because they have some of the same issues, they’re able to help each other ask the right questions and face the people and expectations they’ve been avoiding.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a little sexual and romantic tension between the main characters (isn’t that half of what romantic comedies are all about?), but it’s refreshing to see the characters connecting on another level as well.

The supporting characters, at least on Kendall’s side, are her best friends, who are there for her and for each other.  They’re distinctive and sweet, and Charlotte, one of the people getting married over the course of the book, is responsible for a funny disaster of a bachelorette party (orchestrated by Kendall) that leads to Kendall and Brody getting closer to each other in the aftermath.  Brody has a sister who’s sort of a character (another of the people getting married in the course of the book), but she doesn’t spend much time with him and is more of a walk-on. That’s a shame because Steph comes across, when we do see her, as a character who could probably carry a book all by herself.  I do wish female writers of rom coms would give the male leads as strong a friend group as they give the female leads, or at least give them interesting and rounded supporting characters.  This isn’t the first rom com I’ve read this year where the heroine has friends and family who have lives of their own and the hero has at most a couple of people who could be switched for each other without any readers noticing. 

Of course there’s a happy ever after, which resolves the characters’ life choice issues (and thankfully their problems with identity and self-worth are not resolved by their romance but by their working on those issues with the help of their romance) and feels satisfying and earned.  Even Banner ends up where he belongs, which of course we expected from the outset, no matter how many times Kendall said she was just fostering him. 

For a fun read that will make you want to learn how to ski (or almost make you want to; I have long ago resolved that nothing in the world will get me to attempt to ski down any kind of sloping surface, and even the most charming book in the world isn’t going to change my mind) and will give you some smiles and giggles, check out Four Weddings and a Puppy.

INTERFERING GRANDFATHERS AND TRUE LOVE: IT’S NOT ROM-COMPLICATED

We had a fun discussion of our August selection at the It’s Not Rom-Complicated Book Group meeting.  Of course, that was fairly easy because the book in question was such a good one – The Flatshare had characters who were lovable and believable, supporting characters who felt real and vivid while they were causing or interfering with the main plot, and some great funny scenes, not to mention a few that had me, at least, sniffling a bit, and a happy ever after that was worth the wait.

With a smaller group, it’s sometimes harder to choose a book because there are so few people voting that you can easily end up with a couple of ties with a vote or two each.  Fortunately we were able to come to an agreement for our September book: A Proposal They Can’t Refuse, by Natalie Cana.  Copies are already available at the Circulation Desk.

I haven’t read the book – yet – but I did peek in and devoured the first chapter, and I have to say it starts out very promisingly.  Our female protagonist, Kamilah, is late on her way to work at her family’s restaurant because she’s been called to the senior living center to deal with the latest chaos her abuelo and his best friend have been causing there.  It’s clear that this is not the first time these two have gotten into trouble (this time it’s because they put caffeinated coffee in the residents’ decaf pot, but there are references to other mischief they’ve caused in the recent past), and it’s also clear that these two grandfathers are having a wonderful time together and have no regrets whatsoever about their behavior even if it gets their grandchildren in trouble.  Liam, the grandson of the other troublemaker, appears on the scene and Kamilah “accidentally” punches him in the groin (she did mean to punch the person, she didn’t realize it was Liam).  We have already established, in a few pages, the characters of the two grandfathers and Kamilah and Liam, and they’re all great fun to be around.

The plot of the book is that both Kamilah and Liam want something: Kamilah wants to expand her family’s Puerto Rican restaurant, and Liam wants to take his family’s whisky distillery to the next level.  However, their wily grandfathers refuse to help them unless Kamilah and Liam marry each other.  If the grandchildren don’t, the grandfathers threaten to sell the building in which the two enterprises take place.  Naturally, Kamilah and Liam want nothing to do with this marriage scheme and they’re both prickly about being blackmailed into it, so they decide to go ahead and pretend they’re going to get married, and fool the grandfathers into giving them what they want.  Obviously things will go wrong with this fake marriage scheme, and it may well be that the wily grandfathers know more about the two of them than they know about themselves.

What’s not to like?  Lively characters, a fun setup, interfering grandparents, a fake marriage and enemies to lovers, all leading (of course) to a happy ending – sign me up.  If it sounds good to you, come and join us.  Our next meeting is after Labor Day and that gives plenty of time to read a quick, entertaining book like this one.  Hope to see you there!

NEXT ROM COM BOOK CLUB SELECTION: THE UNHONEYMOONERS

It’s been so long since I started a new book group that I’d forgotten how small a book group can be at the very beginning, and that book groups grow over time.  Our first meeting of the It’s Not Rom-Complicated Book Group had a grand total of two attendees (other than myself, of course), but we still had a great time together, discussing Secretly Yours, our first selection, and choosing our book for July.  I hope we’ll get more people to join us for our July meeting, on  July 11 at 7 p.m., and I think our book choice should be a lot of fun for both aficionados of romantic comedies and people who are just looking for a fun read.

The Unhoneymooners, by Christina Lauren, features the “unlucky” twin, Olive.  Her twin, Ami, does everything right and always wins, making Olive, with her unfortunate mishaps and her recent job layoff, feel as if she’s the perpetual loser.  Ami is about to get married, with Olive as her maid of honor.  Aside from the humiliating contrast between herself and her sparkling sister, Olive isn’t looking forward to the festivities because the best man, Ethan Thomas, is her nemesis, but, as maid of honor and best man, they’re going to have to spend time together.

Actually, they’re going to spend more time together than they anticipated, because the entire wedding party comes down with food poisoning, EXCEPT Olive and Ethan.  There’s a honeymoon cruise to Hawaii which is nonrefundable, and so Olive and Ethan take advantage of the opportunity.  Of course, this means they have to pretend to be newlyweds (this is a honeymoon, after all), but they think they should be able to manage that for ten days.  Naturally, one thing leads to another, and those mortal enemies start to discover a different set of feelings for each other.

For those who are keeping track, this is two tropes in romantic comedies: enemies to lovers and fake marriage.

Copies of the book are available at the Circulation Desk.  Come in, pick up a copy, read it and laugh, and then come to join us for what should be a fun, lighthearted discussion.

ANOTHER BOOK CLUB??

It’s true that I’m already running three book groups through the library, and it’s also true that I’m starting another, called It’s Not Rom-Complicated, which will be focusing on Romantic Comedies, and which will have its first meeting on Tuesday, June 6, at 7 p.m.

You might be wondering, as any sensible person would, why on earth I would want to run yet ANOTHER book group.  You might even be wondering about whether I’m plugged in.  Honestly, I wonder about that latter issue frequently myself. 

So why another book group?  What made me think this was a good idea?

Well, in some respects it’s part of my job as Head of Adult Services. Book groups are a great way to get people reading and discussing library materials, and that means more circulation of those materials, which is one of my job goals.  Building community relationships is also a part of my job, and book groups are, in my opinion, a great way to build relationships among people who have a lot in common but may never have discovered that without the book group.

And, while I don’t like to brag, I do think I’m pretty good at running book groups.  I’ve been doing it for years and I’ve learned a lot over that time: how to set the ground rules, how to get the group to choose what to read, how to lead discussions.  Expertise wants to be used.

But the real reason is because it’s fun.  Book groups are fun, fun to lead, fun to join, fun to participate in.  Here’s a genre of books I enjoy reading, and I know there are other people out there who enjoy them, too.  When I read a book I enjoy, I want to share it with other people.  I want to be able to discuss its good and bad points with other people who’ve read it and who probably have different opinions and perspectives from mine.  Discussions in book groups give me new insights into things I’ve read, no matter how familiar I might be with the book. 

And, at least in my book groups, we laugh a lot.  Even if the books themselves aren’t necessarily funny, we find ways to find humor in the discussions, and I don’t think I’ve had a meeting of any of my book groups where we didn’t crack each other up at least once, and sometimes frequently.  

If there’s any genre that should lend itself to some good laughs, it’s romantic comedy.  Sometimes it’s witty banter that demands to be read out loud to a sympathetic audience.  Sometimes it’s ridiculous situations that are resolved in ridiculous, almost slapstick, ways.  Sometimes it’s just quirky characters who do funny things with great seriousness.  But it wouldn’t be romantic comedy if there weren’t at least some humor in it, and the ones I particularly like have a lot of humor in them.

I’m looking forward to the group. I’m already having fun considering the books we’re going to be choosing from for the next month’s read, books I’ve read already, books I always wanted to read and didn’t have the time to read, new books that just look like they’re going to be entertaining.  It’s certainly going to counteract the often dark stuff we’re reading in Field of Mystery, and sometimes in Field Notes, and there’s nothing like balance.

So if you’re interested in romantic comedy, or if you think you might be but haven’t given it a chance yet, come and join us.  At this point it looks as if we’ll have meetings on the first Tuesday night of every month, but that’s subject to change depending on people’s interest and schedules.  At our first meeting, on June 6, we’ll be discussing Secretly Yours, by Tessa Bailey.  Should be fun.

A ROM COM THAT SWITCHES THINGS UP: BEAR WITH ME NOW

“Exit, pursued by a bear” is the most famous Shakespearean stage direction (in fact, it might be the greatest stage direction of all time, Shakespeare or not), and it turns out that it’s also one of the great meet cutes of all time, as evidenced in Bear With Me Now by Katie Shepard, a funny romantic comedy that slyly breaks a lot of the conventions of the genre while still delivering on everything you want in a rom com.

Teagan Van Zijl, our male lead, is wandering through the wilds in an effort to escape from a (humorously and vividly described) wilderness therapy retreat in Montana when he encounters a grizzly bear.  Being a city boy and having only the most limited experience of wildlife, of course he panics and has no idea how to escape. Enter our female lead, Darcy Albano, who’s working as handywoman at the retreat, who has vast knowledge of the outdoors and wildlife, and who rescues him from the bear. She gets him medical attention but only after making him swear that he will not mention the bear when he explains how he got these cuts and bruises.  

If that isn’t a meet cute, I don’t know what is.  Consider how we’re already in an interesting place (how many romantic comedies start in Montana?), and how we’ve already reversed the roles, so that it’s a gentleman in distress and the person with the expertise who does the rescuing is the lady (though you might have some reservations about calling Darcy a “lady”).  

Teagan is suffering from panic attacks due to his high-powered job as head of a charitable organization that his late mother mismanaged so badly it’s in desperate need of money.  He’s not at all cut out for that job (he hates asking people for money), but he feels responsible because it’s the family charity and it was his alcoholic mother who drove it into the ground. His well-meaning but somewhat flighty younger sister, Sloane, accompanied him to this wellness retreat for addicted people, though she has more substance abuse problems than he does.  

Darcy, by contrast, is a woman who can do all kinds of things but who has made a mess of her life to date. She wants to be a park ranger but she can’t seem to get the requisite college degree.  She knows a tremendous amount about ecosystems and wildlife, as well as practical information about maintaining vehicles and other machinery.  She’s being both overworked and underused in the retreat, but she’s having trouble figuring out where she’s going to live and work next.

Of course she and Teagan fall for each other, but Teagan doesn’t tell her why he’s really at the retreat, pretending instead that he’s an alcoholic (he knows all about alcoholism because of his mother).  This is the classic deception that nearly causes the whole relationship to founder at the critical point (don’t all romantic comedies, and a lot of romances, have that as the turning point?).  He doesn’t want to lose her when he returns to New York City, so he persuades Darcy that he needs her to come back with him as his sober companion, and Darcy, being dedicated, does everything she can to help him combat his supposed drinking problem, which doesn’t really exist.  

There are lots of aspects of this book which switch up the usual rom com tropes.  For instance, though Teagan is a rich man (relatively), he isn’t a jerk about it like the stereotypical Alpha rich guy (I’m looking at you, Christian Grey).  His anxiety issues are real and well portrayed; you feel for him in his panic attacks, and you can understand where they come from and how frightening they are for him.

Darcy, too, is a refreshing female character.  She has made a mess of her life, basically living from temporary job to temporary job, but that’s not because she’s a bad or sloppy person.  She’s trying very hard to get the credentials she needs to get the jobs she wants, but her time in the Navy as well as her attempts to get her college degree are stymied by things beyond her control.  It becomes apparent as a reader that Darcy has some unacknowledged learning disability, and kudos to the author for showing a more realistic vision of what her dyslexia would be like.

There are a number of scenes in the book that verge on slapstick but never quite fall into absurdity.  The dialogue is crisp and funny, the kind you want to read aloud to others while you’re reading.

Of course there’s a happy ending (it’s a rom com, after all), and it feels like an earned happy ending, where the characters you’ve been cheering for overcome their issues with each other and with the world around them and end up exactly where you want them to be.

For a fun and refreshingly different sort of Romantic Comedy, check out Bear with Me Now and enjoy.

FAKE ENGAGEMENT DONE RIGHT: THE FIANCEE FARCE

One of the classic tropes of romance and romantic comedies is the fake engagement: two people who have to pretend to be engaged to marry each other before there’s any relationship between them, and of course the relationship develops as a part of the fake engagement.  This is easier to carry off if the book is set in the past, when you could believe in parents or grandparents or powerful people requiring that a person get married in order to get a benefit.  Is it impossible to pull this off in a modern story and make it believable?  No, but you have to set it up right.  For an example of the way to work a fake engagement story in today’s world, look no farther than The Fiancee Farce, by Alexandria Bellefleur, which is a fun read that takes the trope and runs with it. 

You have both sides of the fake set up here.  First, there’s Tansy, a shy person who runs an independent bookstore that her stepmother owns (long story) and who loves romance novels.  In order to get out of some family related nightmares, Tansy created an imaginary girlfriend, and in a moment of weakness she chose Gemma West, the model for a number of romance novel covers, as her supposed girlfriend.  Put in a position where she’s about to be exposed as a liar, at the wedding of her mortal enemy, Tansy is desperate to come up with a plausible story when the real Gemma West saunters into the wedding and, discovering Tansy’s situation and wanting to embarrass her evil cousin, Tucker, who’s also Tansy’s mortal enemy, she not only plays along but ups the stakes, announcing that the two of them are actually engaged.

Gemma, it turns out, is the black sheep of a rich family that owns a newspaper empire.  Her grandfather, the last CEO of the company, named her, rather than her father, her cousin or her uncles, as the next CEO, provided she’s married by the date of the next shareholder meeting.  His reason for that provision is that he felt he was made a better man by his being married, and he felt his granddaughter would also be in a stronger position to run the company if she had someone who loved and supported her by her side.

Tansy’s lie is perfectly understandable in the circumstances, and while the grandfather’s provision in the will is a little iffy, I personally was willing to go along with it.  It was plausible enough.

So the two of them agree to a marriage of convenience.  Gemma will provide Tansy with a huge sum of money to buy the bookstore from her stepmother and improve it (her stepmother was planning to sell the bookstore to an evil conglomerate, one of the two evil conglomerates in the background of this plot) if Tansy will marry her and stay married to her for two years (the time required by the will – again, this is kind of artificial, but the author carries you along).  This is purely a business proposition, at least at first, since the two of them don’t even know each other when the “engagement” starts.  Naturally, this being a romance, they will get to know and love each other as their relationship continues, despite the best efforts of the people around them to wreck things.

It’s mostly Gemma’s family, outraged by the idea that she might take over the company when she’s got no experience and has been a scandal to the family for years, who are determined to undermine the relationship, but they have help from outsiders as well.  Not all of Gemma’s friends are thrilled with her plan, and not all of them take this well.

The two main characters are great fun, very different in personality but equally strong-willed and shaky in their sense of their ultimate worth.  They fit together really well, and their relationship develops quickly but believably.  I liked them both and rooted for them to end up happily ever after (knowing, because of the kind of book this is, that they would).

The heat/descriptiveness of sex in this book is, on a scale of one to five (one being they don’t even kiss till they’re married and five being just this side of pornographic), probably 3.5 to 4.  They have a great time sexually together, and there are no really cringey descriptions of body parts or metaphors, but there is enough detail that you get a sense of what they’re doing and why they’re having such a great time.

As you know if you’ve been reading this blog, I’m all for the secondary characters in romantic comedies, and Gemma’s housemates are a wonderful bunch, especially Teddy.  The members of Gemma’s extended family are almost uniformly awful, with the exception of Gemma’s mother and her smart-ass uncle Brooks, who have an adorable side plot of their own.  Tansy is kind of lacking in supporting characters (and I wish the author hadn’t named one character Kat when the stepmother’s name is Katherine – a little more imagination, please!), but she’s immediately sucked into Gemma’s friend group so that’s okay.

The fake-engagement-turned-into-real-marriage is a trope for a reason.  When it’s done right, as it is here, it’s immensely satisfying.  

A QUIRKY ROM COM: ANGELIKA FRANKENSTEIN MAKES HER MATCH

You wouldn’t think that a romantic comedy based on Frankenstein would be a good idea, or even a possible idea.  Aside from the whole monster-kills-everyone-the-protagonist-cares-about thing, there really aren’t a lot of characters in that book who seem to deserve a happily ever after (though I personally have always felt some sympathy toward the creature).  So how does Sally Thorne manage to make Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match work?  Simple.  She doesn’t actually use the characters as they’re set out in Frankenstein, or follow the plot of that book too closely, and it works.

She starts by creating an all-new character, Victor Frankenstein’s younger sister, Angelika, who has spent her life helping him with his reanimation work.  He’s determined to prove himself to the world, and especially to show that he’s a better scientist than his peer, .  Angelika, despite being rich (the Frankenstein family is wealthy) and good looking, is odd enough that she is afraid she’s never going to find a man who’s willing to marry her.  So, in true Frankenstein fashion, she decides she’s going to make herself a perfect man.  Or at least a man who’s got a perfect body.  While Victor makes his creature, Angelika takes parts from a handsome corpse in the morgue and makes one of her own.  What could possibly go wrong?

It’s a romantic comedy, so of course things go wrong. Victor’s creature runs off into the night, terrifying the locals whenever they see him and thwarting all Victor’s efforts to find him.  Angelika’s creature is a little better behaved, but he’s freaking out because he can’t remember anything of his prior life, and even though his body reacts favorably to Angelika, he doesn’t feel he can allow himself to be a part of Angelika’s life if he was already married or committed to someone else.  Which means Angelika has to help him find out who he was, without actually letting anyone else know how he was raised from the dead.

Add in Victor’s fiancee, Elizabeth (who suffers a bad fate in the original Frankenstein, but who’s a real character with personality and humor here) and Captain , who’s clearly falling in love with Angelika (to add tension to the situation) and Victor’s creature (who gets named Adam over the course of the book) and assorted other characters, and you have a fun book that plays with the questions Mary Shelley didn’t choose to worry about and that ends, as the original doesn’t, with a well-deserved happy ever after.

The book is so enjoyable that even though there’s a hint that these characters are the inspiration for Frankenstein itself (shades of “and that’s the book you’ve just been reading”), I found it charming rather than annoying. 

You don’t have to have read Frankenstein to appreciate and enjoy this book, and if you did read Frankenstein you might have a prejudice against Victor (who is such a tool in the book) that might get in the way of liking this Victor.  If you’re in the mood for a romantic comedy with some heat (nothing too graphic), likable characters, a unique plot and a good sense of humor, check out Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match.

GRIEF, GUILT AND BASEBALL: EVVIE DRAKE STARTS OVER

At first glance, Evvie Drake Starts Over, by Linda Holmes, seems like a rom com.  The cover, with its charming house and its cute lobster (indicating that this takes place in Maine), suggests that, and the inside cover description of the plot also makes it sound like a standard sort of romantic comedy: young widow living alone, isolating herself from the town, baseball player who can’t pitch anymore comes to stay in an apartment in her house, sparks arise between the two of them.  You’re thinking you’ve seen this movie before.  But all of that is a bit deceptive.  It’s not a classic romantic comedy, like, for instance, I Hate You More, or To Have and to Hoax.  It’s much closer, in a lot of ways, to Beach Read, by Emily Henry, than it is to either of those lighter, more cheerful (and even silly) books.  

Which is not to say that it’s not a good read.  I’m just trying to give you a little advance warning of the kind of book it isn’t, so you can, if you read it, appreciate it for the book it is.

People in town think Evvie Drake, widow of Dr. Drake, a beloved local doctor, is in deep mourning because her husband died so suddenly in a car accident and she’s just not ready to deal with it.  Evvie is suffering, and is isolating herself from the people in her small town, and may be borderline depressed, but there’s more to her pain than the loss of her husband.  The truth is, she was getting ready to leave him, to the point of having packed her bags and loaded up her car, when she got the call that he was in an accident (this isn’t a spoiler; you see this at the beginning of the book).  Nobody knows that, not even Andy, her closest friend and confidant, just as nobody knows that Evvie’s husband was emotionally abusive and their marriage was a mess. Part of Evvie’s issue is that she thinks people expect her to be feeling a certain way, and she’s feeling guilty because she doesn’t feel that way and she’s lying to everybody about this.

Dean, the boarder, is a former pitcher for the Yankees who’s gotten the “yips,” where suddenly and for no apparent reason, he can’t pitch anymore.  His whole identity was wrapped up in baseball, and so this is a major issue for him, even before you add in all the harassment from the media and people on the internet, and his name being used as a synonym for choking. He’s a friend of Andy’s, and Andy steers him to Evvie’s house because Evvie could use the rent, and Andy also thinks Evvie needs to stop isolating herself.

In a certain type of story, what would happen is that Dean would discover his pitching again because of the love of a good woman (or his getting away from it all in Maine), and he would help Evvie deal with her guilt and her grief and the two of them would end up happily ever after. And there’s a point in this book where that almost seems about to happen, but fortunately for us all, the author doesn’t take the easy way out, any more than Evvie or Dean does. They find their way to their own resolutions, and while there is a happy ending (in this, we definitely have the rom com standard), it’s not the obvious one, even though it feels right for these particular people in this particular situation.

There are some great secondary characters in this book as well (one of the things I look for in a rom com), and I especially liked the relationship between Evvie and Andy. It’s so unusual and refreshing to see a deep friendship between a man and a woman that’s purely platonic without even a hint of “will they or won’t they”.  It’s not a perfect relationship, and the two of them have to work on their boundaries and trust issues, but they care enough about each other that they do that work.  Andy’s daughters, whom he’s raising as a single father, are also fun characters in their relationship with Evvie as well as with their father.  They come across as real, if quirky, children, which is another thing I appreciate (I’m tired of the precocious kids who come across like adults in smaller bodies).  You get the feeling this is a real world, with people who all have their own lives that they continue to live even when the author isn’t paying attention to them.  

While there’s definitely humor here, and there’s also romance, it’s not really a book that’s heavily into either of those things.  It’s a good read, with characters you care about and a plot that feels realistic as well as charming. For a light read that’s not too frothy, that’s romantic and sexy but not excessively so (and I realize everybody has their own drawn lines on what’s excessive; this was muted enough to pass muster for me), you could hardly do better than Evvie Drake Starts Over.

HOW MUCH MISERY IS TOO MUCH? ONE PLUS ONE

Reading Jojo Moyes One Plus One is not exactly like reading a rom com, though there are things it has in common with that genre, including a couple who (kind of) meet cute, a relationship that develops between them despite the obstacles that block them from each other, and a series of misadventures.  There is even, though I really doubted this was going to happen in One Plus One, a happy ending.  I take happy endings for granted in rom coms, no matter how dreadful things may seem in the course of the story, which is one reason I read them avidly.  One Plus One does not give you that assurance (though I just did as a spoiler, because this is the kind of book where you need that kind of spoiler), and it’s possible that if this weren’t one of the selections for my senior citizens’ book group, I wouldn’t have read it, and I would have missed out.

Jess, our main character, starts out under a major cloud, mostly financial.  She’s raising two children by herself (only her daughter, Tanzie, is actually her biological child; her other child, Nicky, is the child of her ex-husband by another woman).  Her ex hasn’t lifted a finger to help support the children, claiming to be too depressed to get a job or get himself together, and Jess is kindhearted enough not to push him.  She also has a dog, Norman, whose main skill seems to be flatulence.  Jess works two jobs, as a housecleaner and as a barmaid, and barely scrapes by. Nicky is constantly getting beat up by the local family of thugs.  Tanzie, younger than Nicky, is brilliant in math but isn’t really able to do anything about her intelligence in the school she goes to.  When her teacher proposes that Tanzie start in a private school for math geniuses, with a potential scholarship, Jess obviously wants that for Tanzie but knows in her bones that she can’t afford it by any stretch.  However, there’s a math olympiad in Scotland which Tanzie could qualify for, and if she can win that competition, she could have enough money to cover her school fees for a year or two, and Jess is sure they’d be able to work something out by the time the moneys would wear out.  There’s one problem, though: they have no way of getting to the competition.

Enter our second main character, Ed, a tech millionaire who’s lousy at human relationships (is that a cliche or what?), who is in major trouble for insider trading.  If you could imagine the most innocent way a person could accidentally give away insider information, you’d probably be close to imagining what Ed did.  Blocked from his workplace, in imminent danger of being arrested, tried and sent to jail, Ed is in a bad place when he gets drunk at the bar where Jess works.  As she gets him in a taxi and sends him home, she discovers that he dropped his wallet in the cab, with enough money to get Tanzie’s time-limited application for the private school.  

Though Jess is a goody-goody’s goody-goody, she can’t resist that temptation, and she takes the money and uses it, without telling Ed, of course. So when her effort to drive herself and the kids to the competition ends in abject failure (and police involvement, which doesn’t bother Jess as much as the fines and associated costs she’s going to be stuck with when she’s already in over her head), and Ed drives by and, for no reason he can articulate to himself, volunteers to drive them to the competition, the whole time they’re together, Jess is aware that she’s done something wrong, that she’s unworthy of Ed’s reluctantly given help.

This is a road trip book to a large extent, and there are various adventures and misadventures along the way, and yes, as you would expect, the characters begin to bond in the confines of Ed’s car, which he’s forced to drive at no more than 40 miles per hour because of Tanzie’s serious motion sickness (which, of course, extends the time the group is stuck together).  Think of an English version of Little Miss Sunshine, with a budding romance happening between the two main characters, and you have some idea of how the book goes.

My biggest problem with One Plus One, which may be more of a reflection on me and where I am at this point in my life than on the book itself, is the sheer amount of bad luck and misery the author throws at the characters.  It’s not enough that Ed’s in danger of going to jail for his insider training; he also has a father who’s dying of cancer whom he’s been avoiding out of shame.  It’s not enough that Jess has a useless ex husband and no end of money troubles; she has a stepson who’s being badly beaten by neighborhood thugs the local police won’t touch, and she loses one of her jobs and discovers that her ex is even worse than she suspected, and things go wrong (and badly wrong) for Tanzie as well.  

As you’re reading along, every time you think things might take a turn for the better, they go in the opposite direction.  Ed shows Nicky how to fight back against the local thugs, and they retaliate in a terrible way.  Tanzie makes it to the competition, only her glasses which she needs to read are smashed right before she gets there, so she can barely see the papers for part of the timed competition.  Jess is relentlessly upbeat and optimistic but the author has to beat her down to the point where she’s practically collapsed in depression (and what rouses her out of her bed isn’t something that’s fun or happy, either). That kind of thing happens again and again

The characters are real and flawed and you care about them.  Ed becomes less of a cliche as you get to know him, and Nicky, for all his sullen exterior, has a great heart.  Tanzie is a math genius, but she’s also crazy about her dog and caring about her mother and their situation.  Jess is clear sighted and warmhearted and struggles mightily to make things work. You want good things to happen to them, and every time the author tightens the screws, it’s harder to keep reading.  How much misery is too much?

There are some great redeeming moments, which I will not spoil here, unless telling you that something good happens counts as spoiling (and if it does, too bad), and there is the aforementioned happy ending. Because it comes after so much unhappiness and so much struggle, it definitely feels earned and realistic.  These characters absolutely deserve the good stuff they get by the end of the book, and, while the ride there was a bit darker and more miserable than I would have liked (I would have been much nicer to these characters as an author), I’m glad I read it.

Whether you’ll like it or not sort of depends on how much you’re willing to go through to get to the happy ending.  If you’re of the “one tragedy per book” school (no judgments there – whatever works for you), you’ll want to give this one a miss.  But if you’re made of sterner stuff and you’re willing to see characters suffer a lot before good things happen to them, give this book a try, and you’ll enjoy it.