When the rubber hits the road in life, it’s hard, if not damn near impossible, to believe that any of the mess and damage can be fixed.
Especially by love, which, if you go with the popularly romantic notion that it’s gooey, soft and ephemerally nice, is barely able to sustain a few saccharine sweet verses in a gift card, let alone rescue the smoking ruins of someone’s life.
But even so, January believes in love, in its ability to make everything better, and to take what’s been broken and make it whole again; well, she does until a few key life events, none of them particularly positive, plunge her into a pit of disillusionment that not even a move to her father’s lakeside home in Michigan can fix.
As Beach Reads by Emily Read (Book Lovers) opens, January is down a dream boyfriend, her mum and dad (for wholly different reasons), a functioning career – she’s a romance writer whose current hatred of all things love-oriented is placing some fairly big obstacles in the way of writing about its magicality and bliss – and a bank account that’s actually got a liveable amount of money in it.
Life is grim, her love life is even grimmer, and she’s not even remotely interested in the fact that her new neighbour, who makes a terrible first impression (a continuing habit of his, he laments), is also a writer, rather fetching to the idea and in need of a whole of life rescuing too.
And that was the moment I realized: when the world felt dark and scary, love could whisk you off to go dancing; laughter could take some of the pain away; beauty could punch holes in your fear. I decided then that my life would be full of all three. Not just for my benefit, but for Mom’s, and for everyone else around me.
As far as January is concerned when this zippy rom-com of a novel gets underway, everything sucks and there’s no rescuing that, no matter how wonderful you think love might be which, for the record, she does not anymore.
But then January meets Gus properly, discovers he’s her writing rival from college, and a celebrated writer of the serious literary type to boot – January is a bug time writer too in her genre which sadly isn’t take as seriously as the indie fare Gus dishes up with cynically bleak ease – and that he’s as stuck in life as she is.
No money. Writer’s block. And in need of a new book that will restore him to literary darling status.
They are, much as January is loathe to admit it, in the same very leaky boat, and before either one of them knows it, they have agreed to a bet where they will write a book in the other’s genre, and see who gets across the publishing finish line first.
It’s a genius idea – January can indulge her newfound dark view of life to her broken heart’s content, and Gus can give vent to his ideas that love, real love, is a cynical construct just aching to be pushed and shoved into a doe-eyed narrative of falsehoods and fluffily twee expectation.
But as they begin to write, and talk and get to know each other way better, it becomes obvious that Beach Reads is going to be less about them diving into unfamiliar writing waters, and far more about everything that will get revealed when each other’s life stories start to see the light of day.
It will surprise exactly no one that Beach Reads follows a fairly conventional rom-com storyline.
But, and this is important, that doesn’t mean it is lacking in surprise, real emotion or the kind of grounded humanity that reminds you how all of us have at one time or another reached for the stars and found ourselves face down in a field of muddy sewerage overflow.
In face, Beach Reads is a treat, full of razor sharp, witty af dialogue that pops and vivaciously leaps from the page, home to the sort of witty repartee from which the very best rom-coms spring.
It’s a joy to read as January and Gus flirt and get real with each other, as they find nascent joy and all-too-familiar sadness and loss, and as they slowly begin to acknowledge that while life may not look like either of them expected, it’s nowhere near as awful as either one of them believe either.
Fair enough – rom-coms are supposed to be about coming alive to the magic and possibility of love and how life can be transformed by its presence; no great amazement that it’s well and truly present and accounted for in this frothily fun and affecting tale of two people coming to grips with life as it and they are now.
When I slid it closer, he folded his fingers into mine, and we sat there, holding hands under the table, pretending we weren’t. Pretending we weren’t acting sixteen years old and a little bit obsessed with each other.
God, what was happening? What was I doing and why couldn’t I make myself stop? What was he doing?
What sets Beach Reads apart from the pack is that it’s happy to go down the bleak rabbit hole of life and admit that problems can’t be solved just by wishing about love being perfect and true, and NICE.
In that respect, the new darker, sadder January, carrying a ton of recently acquired emotional baggage, is right on the money; where she’s wrong is that once life is broken, it can’t be put back together.
Beach Reads definitely puts life for both January and Gus back together, but it does so, in amongst the effervescent wit and startling enjoyable wordplay, with one very knowing eye on how dark things can get and how love, the kind that popular culture loves so much, can fix everything just like that.
It can’t, and Beach Reads is happy to embrace that on the highly heartwarming proviso that you accept that it will eventually gets its way and wonder and hope, and yes, love, will be restored to their right and just positions in both Gus and January’s lives which ends getting restoratively brought together just as you expect them to.
In some ways this gem of a novel follows the exact route you expect it will, but it does with such vivacity, with such a knowingly empathetic grasp on humanity and with so much buoyant wit and charm, that you happily go along with all its rom-comy twists and turns; it earns its happy ending and then some, proof that while love may not work its magic quite as January once thought, that it still has the power to make things right and to do so in a way that feels lastingly good and right and just what the rom-com doctor ordered.