(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Falling out with someone you are close to is never, ever pleasant.
In fact, it’s downright traumatising, made especially more so if there’s no chance for any sort of resolution or closure – hopefully of the positive variety but this is life in all its chaotic uncertainty, so that’s never guaranteed – and it can feel like a grief of sorts as you deal with swirling, almost suffocating feelings of anger and sadness.
Someone who knows all about that and how corrosively terrible it feels is Fallon, the eighteen-year-old woman in her last year of high school at the heart of Melt With You by Jennifer Dugan (Hot Dog Girl) who spends much of her free time working in her divorced single mum’s gourmet ice cream business which she owns with her bestie Carmen.
You’d think, customer peak periods aside – they operate at the moment from a deluxe van, often in their hometown but also on the road at festivals – that this would a low stress kind of job but alas, as summer beckons, Fallon is going to have work in very close quarters indeed with her former bestie and secret girlfriend Chloe, Carmen’s daughter who’s a year older and newly arrived back from her first year at college which has supposedly gone very well indeed.
The only problem is that something BIG of the hooking up kind happened the night before Chloe departed for college, and with an early morning flight making any follow-up chat about where they were at relationship-wise impossible, Fallon was left feeling hurt and betrayed and very, very angry.
I don’t miss the way her voice sounds like she wants to say something else.
Or the way she swallows hard, her eyes narrowed.
And then, before I can even scrape my pride off the floor, she walks away.
Stealing my epic movie ending for herself.
An anger, by the way, that she’s been nursing with the sorrowful fury of the scorned – she thinks she was cast aside without thought but as Melt With You it emerges she might slightly askew with her perspective – and which means that when events conspire to put the two former friends on the road together, driving the van to two make-or-break festivals, things are awkward at best, angry at worst.
The thing is that Chloe is largely oblivious to how Fallon is feeling because Fallon has gone out of her way to not talk about it at all, but as road trips tend to, the truth eventually starts to leak out and the two young women have to decide whether they can rescue their relationship or whether a frosty friendship is the best they are going to be able to salvage.
Complicating things even more, as if they weren’t intensely messy enough, is the fact that Fallon is a Type A planner who likes everything well and truly planned out before she goes anywhere or does anything while Chloe is much more of a freewheeling, let’s have fun kind of person for whom detours and the path less travelled (or back roads in this case) are the stuff of a well-lived life.
Who sees even more trouble ahead on a road trip that has the capacity to put these two approaches at an infuriating loggerhead?
If you think there’s a lot of tension bouncing around like loosing ice cream scoopers and cones in the back of a van. then you’d be right, but even Fallon is willing to admit that she’s possibly overreacting a little; even so, she can’t work out how to dial it back and besides, even though Chloe seems to be going out of her way to make peace with Fallon, there’s no getting away from the fact that Fallon feels deeply hurt and let down by the person she thought was a significant love of her life.
What makes Melt With You such a hugely enjoyable read is that the two leads are actually a lot of fun to spend time with; sure there’s fractiousness and simmering resentment, again mostly from Fallon who leaves Chloe bewildered by the ferocity of her former friend’s feelings much of the time, but it becomes clear that there’s still a really warm and funny friendship there and if they can find a way past the crumbled remnants of what they had before, maybe even more.
As you might expect, the big clash comes from the two friends’ wholly divergent approaches to life.
As Melt With You it becomes clear though that maybe Chloe’s first year at college has sobered her up some when it comes to impulsiveness and rashness and that Fallon could benefit from flying by the seat of her proverbial more than she does already, which let’s be honest, is not at all.
Tomorrow is a big day, the biggest, and I owe it to my mother and Carmen to do my best, and so does she. And so I laugh, loud and fake, but hope it doesn’t sound that way to her.
Much of the fun of the novel comes from its sparkling dialogue, whether lighthearted and full of slowly healing friendship fun or some home truths being delivered and realisations reached, and its capacity for taking its time to let the two main characters work their way through a minefield of wrong assumptions and unarticulated truths.
It’s clear they still like like, and highly likely more, each other and Dugan does a beautifully involving job of setting the scene and then bringing the two back together again in ways that, Fallon is surprised to learn, can’t always be planned.
Life is, in so many ways, a chaotic make it up as you go along kind of deal and nowhere is this more truly observed than in Melt With You which fizzes with the pain of perceived betrayal and hurt but also the effervescent hopefulness of friendship and more regained.
Delightfully, wonderfully warmhearted and queer, Melt With You is a rom-com made of road trips and ice cream, resentment and happy embrace, which recognises how hard it is to get life right and that often we have to just accept that things haven’t gone the way we want and that maybe we have to ditch all the closely held plans and souring emotions and have another shot at something potentially wonderful which has the capacity to happily heal old wounds and open up an altogether expected and loved-up future.