Review: Meet Me in the Margins

Meet Me in the Margins by Melissa Ferguson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Savannah Cade is an Assistant Acquisitions Editor for a small, high-brow publishing company called Pennington Publishing in Nashville. The owner, Ms Pennington, frowns on populist writing such as romance, Sci-Fi, westerns etc, preferring non-fiction titles. Whilst Savannah is very good at her job, she has a secret, she has been writing her very own romance novel! One day, when Savannah retreats to her secret bolt-hole hidden behind a cabinet in the ARC room she finds that someone has read her manuscript and made scathing comments on it.

Savannah's personal life is a bit of a car crash. She broke up with her long-term boyfriend, who promptly asked out her younger, thinner, more successful, more driven sister Olivia and they got engaged within three months. Now Savannah is reduced to renting her sister's spare room and pretending to be happy about house-sharing with her ex. Also her sister is obsessed with exercise and has started an annual Steps-4-Life Step-a-thon to raise money for charity which means she interrogates Savannah about her daily steps.

Then things take a downturn professionally when Ms Pennington's son William leaves his fancy publishing house in New York to run Pennington Pub with his mother, amid rumours that the business is performing badly. Then a well-respected editor of a romance publishing house who had expressed interest in Savannah's manuscript tells her that the novel needs a lot of work before it could be published, and she only has a few weeks before she retires. Savannah is devastated by the news, but the editor's comments are very similar to those made by her mystery reviewer. Can she persuade the mystery reviewer to give her further feedback so that she can whip her novel into shape?

I have commented so many times this year about the number of re-imaginings of You've Got Mail I've read this year, this is in a similar vein. Savannah gets over her dislike/fear of William Pennington quite quickly and they become friends, but she is also drawn to the wit and vulnerability shown by her mystery reviewer, who she thinks is a colleague called Sam, even though in real life Sam never seems to have the spark of his review comments.

This was just lovely, I really loved the mystery reviewer's comment that Savannah can have one character with a fancy name but not both, because its not opera. I can also sympathise with Savannah reading the Word of the Day and then trying to work it into everyday conversation. It's funny, sweet, charming and I read it in a single weekend when I had much more urgent books to read because it was more appealing than the rest of my TBR pile :)

Highly recommended.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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