(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Upending your life and chasing your dreams is almost always seen as a good thing.
And that’s because there is something delightfully energising and impelling about kicking off the shackles of the status quo, particularly a toxic one, and see what lies out there in the great, big, wide fields of possibilities that is life.
But just because something is good, doesn’t mean it is easy, which American Emily Allen discovers when she downs tools as a librarian in New England and heads to rural Ireland to take up a position as the new assistant to her life-changingly favourite author, Siobhan Riordan.
The protagonist of Jenn McKinlay’s novel, Love at First Book, Emily is nervous of course about sending her old life, complete with a toxically overbearing mother, to the existential dumpster, for a year at least, but decides she needs to do something to break a very unhealthy cycle in her life and bring some life back into her life.
While Siobhan is a delight, and proof that you can indeed meet your heroes and it will be everything you ever dreamed, the owner of the bookstore where she has to work afternoons, is most definitely not, a cranky, difficult man named Kieran who might be Mr Darcy in his Colin Firth incarnation HOT but who seems hellbent of sending Emily packed to the States as soon as his gruff, unfriendly ways can make it happen.
Shane glanced between us as if trying to determine the source of the tension. I wanted to say it’s him, all him and his unreasonable suspicions about me, but I didn’t. Before I could pull it together and say anything, Kier said, ‘I haven’t actually so I’d be delighted to join you.’
And there weny my [Emily’s] appetite.
It’s a classic opposites go from antagonism to love set-up but while the plot device is as old as storytelling itself, McKinlay’s approach to it is not, and she invests Love at First Book with a real freshness and vibrancy and some real emotional courtesy of the baggage both Emily and Kieran and a pretty big secret held by Riordan herself.
Ostensibly there to help her favourite author ever finish her Tig McMorrow series, the most recently published volume of which saw the hero stuck in a timey-wimey cliffhanger, and trying desperately hard not to fangirl as she does so, Emily finds her new life comes with the added complication of being deeply and annoyingly attracted to Kieran who, and this will not surprise you but it will make you very happy, may not be as awful as he first appears.
The bliss of Love at First Book, among a great many other things, is how beautifully well McKinlay brings the characters to life, never once allowing them to be cardboard cutout set pieces in a well-worn rom-com story, but real, vivaciously alive who sparkle with buoyant wit and dialogue that’s right up there with Nora Ephon at her best.
From scene to scene, Kieran and Emily come alive as they battle to get the best of each other, their conversations both funny and emotionally meaningful, a real departure for Emily especially who has always been the quiet one, bowed down by mother’s incessantly selfish demands but who finds herself coming alive as she finds a home, a found family and a new profoundly content sense of being.
(courtesy official author site)
You expect rom-coms to be a joy to read; it pretty much comes with the territory.
But there’s something about Love at First Book that makes it even more joyous than normal, and that’s something is the healing that comes from finding your people and your place and discovering that the weight of the world does not have to sit on your shoulders alone.
McKinlay makes it clear that her characters have suffered and that they have secrets and that the path to true love and community won’t be easy; classic rom-com territory beautifully and refreshingly told.
But by giving her characters time to express themselves fully, to sit in the darkness and the pain as much as the nascent love and sense of companionship they discover, she adds a hefty emotional resonance to Love at First Book which carries with it a real sense of how life can weigh you down but also lighten the load and lift you up too.
Emily has every reason to doubt that the second half of that truth can happen to her, after a life spent labouring fruitlessly in her mother’s narcissistic shadows, but as she impulsively takes up her dream gig in Ireland, she comes to realise that while she’s had to grapple with some pretty terrible things in her blighted life, that it’s also possible for her to find happiness too.
‘Emily!’ I turned and there was Kier trudging towards me, carrying my coat. I supposed I should be grateful, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want him to see me like this. I lifted my glasses and swiped at my face with my sleeve. I made my expression neutral and as he held out my coat to me.
‘Thanks … Murphy,’ I said.
It’s what she’s hoping for, and in Love at First Book what she gets, but it’s the way her life is transformed and how meaningful the journey is that makes the book so special.
You are there in the rom-com trenches with Emily and Kieran, but also with Siobhan and her new assistant, the former becoming the mother Emily always wanted and needed, and while yes, the usual rom-com fairytale wand is waved, it comes with real emotional import and the kind of authenticity that grounds Love at First Book in real life.
The big difference here is that the dead hand of real life doesn’t have the upper hand, and that all the things Emily hoped this change of life might be do happen and her wishes, hopes and dreams actually find living, breathing, warmly inclusive and supportive form.
Flawlessly, seamlessly wonderful, Love at First Book never once put a foot wrong, gifting us with characters who sparkle with weight, meaning and fun, situations that crush the heart even as they bring it marvellously back to buoyant life, a supporting cast and a town you most definitely want in your corner and your life, and a storyline that, yes, ticks all the usual rom-com tropes and cliches, but which does so with vivacity, joy and an original zest that makes Emily’s move from the States to Ireland, from the known to the unknown, an epically wondrous joy that will you deliriously giddy with joy at the end but also contentedly happy that life can defy the odds and be this wonderful.