(courtesy Allen & Unwin Australia)
Romcom detractors, and honestly who stole your rose-eyed, happily romantic hearts and replaced with them stones, will tell you that once you’ve read one story in the story, you’ve read them all.
But that dismissive assessment of an entire genre completely ignored the fact that there are a metric ton of really talented romcom writers out there who take all the usual tropes and cliches suspects and gussy them up in fancy new clothes and meta-minded characters who know they are in one of those stories they’ve read about.
In short, there are a lot of super clever, highly inventive and rewardingly original romcoms out there to set your ailing heart afire with swoon-heavy possibility and among their number you can add Love Overdue by Ali berg and Michele Klaus which does a delightful job of upending expectations and throwing in some good old fashioned raw humanity for good measure.
Gone for many modern romcoms are the days when the protagonist and the person with whom they are destined to fall in love – let’s be honest, no matter how inventive things get, you still need the two lovebirds-to-be to stand out like glow sticks on a dark mid-winter’s night – flew through their all-but-inevitably-fate-filled-romance with a Teflon-like ability to kick all the darkness of lie casually to one side.
In fact, so squeaky clean and untroubled were these protagonists in their swanky apartments and their high-achiever jobs that they often barely felt human at all.
Leaning back into my chair, I take a deep breath, trying to ground myself into this time, this place. I’m not the same girl, I find myself repeating in my head. I will not let Jamie Sultana break my heart all over again.
But the times are not just a-changing, they have well and truly changed already and Love Overdue is exhibit A (for this review at least).
The protagonist du jour is Lauren Green, the vice principal of North Caulfield Primary School in Melbourne (Australia) who leads a reasonably buttoned-down life and who nurses deep hurt from past trauma that makes her reluctant to wear her heart on her sleeve to obviously, and often not at all.
She’s newly stung by her break-up with the very lovely Tom, a fellow teacher that everyone agrees, including Lauren’s bestie, Liv, is a real, sweet, boy-next-door catch, and while she initiated it, very publicly (who asks someone to marry them in front of the whole school? Especially when their partner is not a PDA kinda woman at all) and nursing lingering from some terrible family trauma two decades earlier.
Now in the back half of her thirties, Lauren only cares about being the best vice principal she can be – it would be nice if the principal would actually do his job but that doesn’t seem likely any time this side of the end of the world – and maybe one day resuming her writing ambitions, though that doesn’t seem likely any time soon.
And trying to avoid spending too much time with the very handsome Jamie Sultana, father of one of her favourite students, April, and the guy who broke her heart back in high school when he broke up with her in senior year with no real explanation.
(courtesy official author site)
Alas Jamie is on the committee of invested parents who are consulted about school priorities, programs and works and so Lauren can’t really avoid him too much.
What makes her constant exposure to the past romantic pain of Jamie is that he acts as if he doesn’t recognise her at all, and while she goes by Lauren rather than Wren now, she surely doesn’t look that dramatically different, does she?
Perhaps she does, because as Love Overdue cranks into amusingly moving high gear, managing a delightful balance between humourously quirky and emotionally sober, she and Jamie keep interacting as if they have never met before when there’s a whole world of painful past experience between them.
A love letter to books and reading as much as it as a paean to love itself – this makes sense if you know that Berg and Kalus are the founders of Books on the Rail and self-declared professional Book Ninjas (also sort of the title of one of their novels, The Book Ninja) as well as talented writers, of course – Love Overdue has a great deal of fun with why the hell Jamie doesn’t know who Lauren is.
Not only does his lack of cognisance sting from a personal validation point of view but it means that any hope has of closure from past pain and a shot at possible future love looks like it hasn’t got a hope in bookish heaven of getting off the ground.
When we finally unravel. we fill the room with old rhythms and new gasps — the sounds of two people finding their way back into the very same story they started years ago, in spite of every plot twist thrown in their way.
But Love Overdue is an expertly written romcom and so while romantic amnesia may seem to be the order of the day, it can’t be the whole story and so it turns out not to be (but that must naturally be left to the reading so we don’t venture too much into sigh-worthy spoiler territory).
Suffice to say that this cut-above-the-average romcom plays its tropes and cliches with an inventive piece of mischief and fun and also a refreshing sense that while love is a wondrous delight, it only really hits home with any lasting escapist impact if it feels like it’s happening to real people.
Which is precisely, all narrative convenience and romcom gleefulness aside, is precisely what Lauren and Jamie feel like.
They have less than perfect lives, they make mistakes, commit massive errors of judgement and say things that would have been better left unsaid and so, when love does find them eventually, and of course, you knew it would, it feels like as real as any kind of romcom love story can manage because they feel real.
If ever a romcom novel scorner dares engage you in some sort of dismissive genre putdown, then proffer Love Overdue as your example of a romcom that bounces and zings and takes all the usual tropes and cliches and has a LOT of really clever fun with them, offering up a love story that feels like it is cut from real life with just about genre convenient magic which gives you the escapism you need to feel good about the world again.