(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Being your real life is not as easy as it’s cracked up to be.
Sure, there is a slew of movies, books, poems, TV shows and all kinds of other media dedicated to merrily and inspiringly advancing the idea that there’s nothing better than outwardly displayed, inner authenticity.
And honestly, they’re right – being yourself is freeing in a way that hiding your actual self never is and never can be but when you are deep in a closet of your own making, it can be enormously hard to convince yourself of that, especially if like Sarah Childs, a household in her small Queensland country town of South Star and the protagonist of Clare Fletcher’s novel, Love Match, there’s a whole lot of spotlight to step into if you dare to let your inner truth see the light of highly scrutinised day.
Everyone knows Sarah’s name and where she goes and who she talks to and why she’s talking to them; as she observes constantly in her “Small Town Problems” quips, almost nothing escapes the watchful gaze of your fellow citizens in a small town, and while that sense of community has obvious perks, it also has considerable downsides too.
Such as when, if you decide that maybe you want to see who you are really are.
Sarah tentatively tried it once and it blew up in her face, and she’s disinclined to try again.
If a bit of socialising and joining a few committees meant they’d take her seriously, she could get through it, She could humour her parents for a year if it meant getting to come back to Dunromin as the boss at the end of it. God, maybe she could find a boyfriend and they’d take her back even sooner.
A plan begin to take shape in her mind. She’d show them community spirit. She’d be Miss bloody South Star if that’s what it took. How hard could it be?
But as her parents make it a rule of their only child taking over their property, something she has wanted with all her not-quite-authentically-expressed being since she was a kid, that she spend a “Rumspringa” type year out in the community, she realises that some introspection might be the price of realising her dream.
But that’s not necessarily what she initially sets out to do when she moves in with town gossip and matchmaker to a legion of country folk, 75-year-old Mabel Peters, who enlists her part-time roommate – one thing Sarah has to do is get a place in town so she’s well placed to stoke the fires of the community spirit her loving parents insist she must somehow acquire – to catalogue the voluminous wardrobe of designer gowns and dresses, acquired over a lifetime that may not have gone quite where it was meant to.
While Sarah is also playing hard as a member of South Star’s newly-formed women’s rugby team and running the local show to highly successful effect, she discovers that Mabel, who was first featured in less fully realised form in Fletcher’s previous brilliantly engaging novel, Five Bush Weddings, has some life-scarring secrets of her own which may have instructive lessons for Sarah as she gets to know attractive new cop in town, Sergeant Smith.
One of the many delights of Love Match is getting to know Mabel far better, a woman who works well as a cameo character in Five Bush Weddings but who really comes into her narrative propelling own in Fletcher’s new work.
The other is the rom-com aspect to Love Match which works a treat.
That’s primarily due to the fact that Fletcher, who knows her way around country towns and the lives of its rich and colourful characters, doesn’t just spin a merry tale of love found.
That’s always fun, of course, but by investing Sarah’s search for love, which takes her to some unexpected places – they might not be so unexpected if Sarah had been free to embrace her authentic self, though that may have less to do with the town and more with some internal demons she spends the novel besting to highly engaging effect – with a search for inner, and then outer, truthfulness, this impressively adept writer grants a real emotional muscularity to the story.
In short, Sarah doesn’t just fall in love; she also gets to know herself and come alive again in some fairly transformative ways and this informs the rom-com aspect of the storyline with the kind of humanity theses types of tales are not always the recipients of and which they are enriched by every time.
Falling love is delightful but how much better is it if it the cherry on top of some deep inner searching and digging which changes who you are as a person.
One of the things that Love Match establishes with real vivacity and humanity is that getting to find yourself (again?) is the real prize to be had and that anything that comes from that is a wonderful added bonus.
Sarah’s heart thudded in her chest, but she couldn’t seem to get her feet moving. What if they saw her? She pulled herself away and ran back to find Naomi and Sophie.
Reading as Sarah comes truly alive is a joy.
She embarks on this journey quite reluctantly, convinced her parents are being more than just a little unfair, even going so far as to find a fake boyfriend in Brent who may not be so fake after all, at least from his side of things.
But as finds herself enjoying her time cataloguing exquisite fashion with Mabel and getting to know her better, and becoming a star of the women’s rugby team which also means getting to know the new policeperson in town better – in true rom-com style they butt heads at first but might something more positive lies in wait? – she discovers that being yourself in the bosom of a loving and inclusive community might just be the best thing that has ever happened to her.
Getting to that point isn’t easy though, though it’s more fun than she expected it to be, and much of Love Match is all about the pleasure and pain of coming to grips with who you really deep down are and working out how that kind of self realisation might be able to exist in the real world.
Full of vivacious wit and characters you will warm to to a heartwarming degree, Love Match is a gritty Aussie country fairytale that comes with a happy ending, one that involves a lot of hard work, a willingness to get to know yourself and to live it openly, and a freeing sense that being known, really known, might just be the best thing that can happen to you.