BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry (BOOK REVIEW/ARTICLE)
One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn’t see coming….
Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.
Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.
If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.
OK, I’ve said this is a cross between a book review and an article because
- romance stories aren’t usually the fantasy-hive vibe (tbh some of us even baulk at Romantasy eh Jonathan?)
but more importantly
- This fascinatingly trope subversive book did also set me thinking about the workings, roles and personnel in the publishing industry
Book Lovers is about two professionals within the publishing industry who find themselves entangled in a situation that could be straight out of one of their author’s books, while they are also collaborating professionally on editing/developing a book.
We are all used to the high visibility personas of AUTHOR and PUBLISHER, who are the start and end-point of a book’s journey into our hands and minds. But in between those two termini (dare I call them bookends?), dwell the usually invisible characters of agent and editor. (Well invisible unless you read the end matter of the author’s acknowledgements where they might expect a nod of gratitude).
The story’s romantic leads comprise
- Nora Stephens, an agent, with the celebrated Dusty Fielding as one of her most renowned authors.
- Charlie Lastra is an editor keen to wield his prose tweaking magic on Dusty’s latest draft novel.
So the article element of this post is going to be about those roles in the publishing element, while the review element is about Charlie and Nora’s story and the way Henry playfully toys with tropes in self-referential ways that make this a more deeply textured book than most romances (or romantasies). However, I don’t feel I’ll be able to avoid braiding those two elements together.
I should mention upfront that I am something of an editor myself – helping friends, family and creative writing students of all ages fine tune their stories. As an author I’ve also benefitted from the reciprocity of having other people casting a constructively critical eye over my work, spotting everything from typos, through discontinuities to more structural and character driven matters. So it is a very real and necessary job – to paraphrase the lawyer quote “the writer who chooses to be their own editor has a fool for a client.” The significance of that role may be why one of the Hugo award categories is for best editor.
However, as I sat in the Glasgowcon award ceremony where the reading public had voted for the winners in each category, I did find myself wondering “how does a reader tell which editor has done the best work?” I mean the whole point is that the reader sees the final finished polished object, free of mark-ups, marginal annotations and fuller comments and analyses. How can they tell how much of that final sheen came from the editorial intervention, rather than the author’s original thoughts?
Some writers find their prose ends up largely untouched by editorial intervention, others find themselves in a collaboration so deep it almost becomes co-authorship. The film Genius brilliantly charts the relationship between the author Thomas Wolfe and his editor Max Perkins including this fascinating clip It’s an 8 minute long clip but at the 2 minute 49 second point, Colin Firth (as Max) starts reading Wolfe’s passage about his protagonist meeting a girl who will be the love of his life. The rest of the clip is about the discussions between writer Jude Law (as Thomas) and editor Colin Firth to distil this passage down to its essentials.
For Hugo voting readers such exchanges, like the inner workings of the sacrament of transubstantiation, lie invisible behind veils of mystery. I suspect the editorial Hugo success is a more a matter of how many of the nominated books you are known to have edited – certainly this year’s winner was editor of at least two finalists. However, that is a hypothesis only – left for the reader to assess with more scientific rigour.
But in Book Lovers, Charlie is an editor while Nora is an agent who aspired to be an editor. Her mother’s death meant that Nora couldn’t leave her well paid agenting job, to take an entry level editor position as she had to assume parental responsibility for her younger sister.
A protagonist with an ambition to be an editor, the most behind the scenes non-public facing of jobs, is just one of the ways that Henry plays with the romance tropes of women seeking more overt personal and professional fulfilment. It is like the character one might expect to be a wannabe theatre actress aspiring instead to be a stage-manager.
The book opens in a tongue-in-cheek self-referential fashion, when Nora – in an engaging first person voice – explains her latest romantic break up with the reader. She is it seems, the villain from every hallmark movie, the big city high powered career woman that the male protagonist abandons because he has found his true love, along with plaid shirts and a new found interest in carpentry, in some sleepy rural idyll.
It doesn’t help that author Dusty’s great success Once in a Lifetime is set in exactly such a sleepy rural idyll called Sunshine Falls, or that Nora’s pregnant sister Libby has discovered that rural idyll is a real place and twisted Nora’s arm into having a month of sisterly time in said idyll, ticking off a list of items lifted from any/every hallmark movie (including the wearing of a plaid shirt).
To further complicate matters, Sunshine Falls is the hometown of Charlie a renowned editor with whom Nora has had one rather tense (almost hostile) lunch meeting. Domestic circumstances have called Charlie home from New York and put him on a collision course with Nora, in a town that is far less idyllic than author Dusty had imagined it. As Nora observes, after Libby describes the date she has set up for her through an app.
She glances away with an apologetic grimace. “Blake already thinks he’s meeting you at Poppa Squat’s for Karaoke”
“Nearly every part of that sentence is concerning.”
Of course, unlike murder mysteries where the big reveal is the who? With romances the who is already known, we know that Charlie and Nora are destined for each other – the question is the how? Except of course, that Henry is constantly toying with the tropes so one can be sure of nothing.
There are the expected descriptions of Charlie’s sexual attractiveness, with honeyed references to caramel eyes and maple syrup, churning Nora’s insides. But there is a constant vein of self-deprecating wit, both in the snarky exchanges between the protagonists and in Nora’s descriptions of places, people and events. When Nora is alarmed to realise that the protagonist of Dusty’s latest book seems to be a caricature of herself as career woman driven agent she moans to Charlie
“Just you wait until one of your authors turns in a book about an amber-eyed asshole editor.”
“Amber-eyed?” he says.
“I notice you didn’t question the asshole part of that sentence,” I say.
Given that this a romance, there is an inevitable drift towards more steamy moments, where Henry manages to navigate a path between the Scyllan and Charbydian perils of prurience and vulgarity. The will-they and won’t-they moments make for an endearing mix of passion and some tongue in cheek humour (I won’t say whose tongue or which cheek!)
The stop-start journey towards consummating the relationship runs in parallel with the two of them co-editing Dusty’s new book, such that the close editing collaboration feels at time like an allegory for a more physical intimacy.
“When we finally do this, Nora,” he says, straightening away from me. His hands slipping my buttons back into buttonholes as easily as he undid them, “it’s not going to be on a library table, and it’s not going to be on a time crunch.” He smooths my hair, tucks my blouse back into my skirt, then takes my hips in his hands and guides me off the table, catching me against him. “We’re going to do this right. No shortcuts.”
Humour is a seasoning that can accentuate the taste of any emotion – puncturing pathos with a laugh makes it hit all the harder. It is a skill Henry deploys well, for example here, where the circumstances of life seem to be conspiring against our would-be lovers.
He tips my jaw up, whispers almost against my lips. “If anyone can negotiate a happy ending, it’s Nora Stephens.”
Despite–-or maybe because of–-the sensation of my chest cracking clear in half, I whisper back, “I think one of those only costs forty dollars at Spaaaahh.”
I found both protagonists engaging, not just for the lively banter in which each gives as good as they get, but for the way Henry adds texture to their characters through their histories. Sometimes the plot of a novel requires characters to do stupid things, make obvious mistakes, or just be illogical. There is however an admirable consistency in how Nora and Charlie respond to the fickle thrusts of fate. Unlike other romances I have read, I never found myself thinking – oh why did they do that? Instead the reader follows the switchback ride of their romance as securely locked into the unavoidability of each twist and turn as any rollercoaster rider.
Constrained by past circumstances, both are trapped in a sense of responsibility to their families (Charlie to his parents, Nora to her sister). While all good books feature flawed protagonists who change through the events of the stories, I find myself more invested in characters whose flaws are external rather than internal – in this case the sense of guilt and duty towards others that has them subjugating their own needs, and forces them always into playing “the strong one.” For example, when thinking about her sister, brother-in-law and nieces, Nora observes
“I want to carve out a place in the city and its magic, just for us. But carving turns you into a knife. Cold, hard, sharp, at least on the outside.”
The subplot involving Nora’s sister Libby weaves in an interesting weft to the warp of the main romance. This is the mystery behind Libby, heavily pregnant with her third child, deciding to take a break from her husband and two young daughters and launch an impetuous sisterly bonding exercise in a faux-idyll. That puzzle feeds in a nice undercurrent of tension, especially with Nora’s drive to “sort everything” for her sister, and the final reveal not only complements but proves integral to the main plot, as Nora is forced to confront her ‘control everything’ urges.
“It’s time to just be sisters, Nora. Don’t fix it. Just be here with me, and say it fucking sucks.”
“It does.” I scrunch up my eyes tight. “It fucking sucks.”
I didn’t know the power of those words. They fix nothing, do nothing, but just saying them feels like planting a stake into the ground, pinning us together at least for this moment.
It is a passage that must resonates for anyone who has invested time, emotion and energy in trying to resolve other people’s problems, and sometimes overlooking the point that ‘now’ is the time for comfort, not solutions.
A further subplot involves Nora’s other lover – the city of New York – which has been a character in so many stories from Woody Allen’s Manhattan, to Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. In the TV serial Suits, the impossibility of leaving the glittering existence of New York was a constant constraint on the characters’ love life ambitions, as it appears to be for Nora. However, given the theme of the book, Henry shows us a different side to the allure of the city with an image of cavernous bookshops.
Life with Mom, life in New York, was like being in a giant bookstore: all those trillions of paths and possibilities drawing dreamers into the city’s beating heart, saying I make no promises but I offer many doors.
As you may see from the quotes already mentioned, this is a book full of elegant prose that had the notes/annotation counter of my kindle clicking over with countless “nice lines.” In that mix of silken phrases, wry humour, and piercing observations, I found the book more touching than many. It did leave me damp eyed in places and my notes besides those multiple ‘nice lines’ have a fair few ‘I’m tearing up here’ building up to my final annotation ‘Sobby McSob.’ Others may not find the book speaks quite so emotionally to them, but then reading is always a matter of fashioning a particular meaning from the blend of reader’s perspective and the author’s text.
The layering of Books and Lovers and Book Lovers around the theme of joint editing, hits a nice peak at this point where the pair start editing each other’s conversation.
“I would be”—I drop my voice—“adorable in Daisy Dukes and pigtails.”
His eyes snap back to my face, flashing, his mouth twitches through that grimacing pout, a pair as reliable as thunder and liughtning. “Not the word I’d use.”
Awareness sizzles down my backbone. I lean closer. “Charming?”
His eyes stay on my face. “Not that either.”
“Sweet,” I say.
“No.”
“Comely?” I guess.
“Comely? What year is it Stephens?”
As any editor or author knows, choosing the right words (and then putting them in the right order) is all there is to writing a book!
With Nora and Charlie coming to the end of their joint editing adventure fine line between professional collaboration and emotional connection again wears thin.
“You ready to finish this, Stephens?”
“Ready.” It’s true and a lie. Does anyone ever want to finish a good book?
This is indeed a good book, that I enjoyed tremendously. In its narrative embedded in the world of books, it makes me hungry now for something similar. (Just spit-balling an idea here, Stacks of Love where a librarian and an archivist silently discover each other’s Dewey-eyed passions?)
Book Lovers is available now, you can order your copy on Bookshop.org