Review: A Novel Love Story

A Novel Love Story by Ashley Poston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Eileen Merriweather is a college English professor who retreated into herself after her fiancé Liam decided he wanted to see other people right before their wedding, leaving her to cancel all the arrangements and inform hi family while he went off with a friend from work 'to clear his head'. Of course not long thereafter he and his friend from work get married. Since then her only interactions are with her online romance book club, and eventually the annual in-person vacation week where they all meet up in an Airbnb to talk romance tropes and drink wine. This year no-one else can make it but Eileen desperately needs a break and decides to drive her clapped out old Pinto hundreds of miles to spend the week at their usual retreat.

Unfortunately, Eileen gets lost, nearly runs over a man standing in the middle of the road, and then finds not only won't her car start, but the town's only mechanic has gone fishing for the weekend. To add insult to injury, there's no cell service. Otherwise this small town she's landed in is perfect, like Stars Hollow or some other utopian small town in America, which isn't surprising because she has somehow arrived in Eloraton, the fictional setting of her favourite romance series which was cut short after the untimely death of its author.

Once she gets over the shock, Eileen is like a kid in a sweet shop, meeting all her favourite characters, eating the famous dishes at the local diner, etc. The one character she can't place is the grumpy owner of the impossibly cute bookshop, Anders, although he seems awfully familiar. However, as she talks to the residents/characters she realises that the author's death has left them all a bit in limbo, doomed not to move forward with their lives because there is no-one to direct them. Can/should Eileen help them to move forward?

This is sort of Brigadoon meets The Gilmore Girls meets ARGH I can't remember the book title (will see if it comes back to me - thought it was Emily Henry - maybe Book Lovers?). The trouble for me was I hadn't read this series of books (I'm not going to be able to explain this very well) so all of Eileen's interactions with the fictional characters felt somewhat removed, like she was explaining her meetings/interactions rather than the reader 'seeing' them. I didn't already know why certain couples were so cute or their meet-cutes were so romantic because I didn't see them, which I guess could be the point, they aren't real so they should be insubstantial but at the same time Eileen interacts with them and really likes them and wants to help she gets drunk on girls' night out with them etc whereas I would have expected her to start realising that they were only two dimensional, like the holograms in Jumanji that only have a set series of responses to expected questions.

I enjoyed this, I enjoyed the romance, and I could sort of understand the logic behind how/why Eloraton comes into being, but I didn't love it.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest review.

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