It’s often the case that when our lives change, they change in fairly big ways.
Sure, we witness incremental shifts on an almost daily basis, but that’s usually to do with small things such as a picking different café to get our coffees or walking a different way to work.
No, the changes that really rock our world are the ones that completely and seismically shifts the axes on which our life shifts such as the one Poppy, the protagonist of Leese Ronald’s Special Delivery, experiences when she falls pregnant, is dumped by party obsessed, shallow boyfriend of nine years and moves back home to Orange in country New South Wales (NSW) from Sydney.
That’s a HUGE one and involves some of the top 10 things that can stress anyone out to the point of immovability; she’s about to become a mum, she’s alone (save for her lovely parents) and she no job, no grown-up friends in town (thank god for her BFF Dani who’s only a speed dial away) and no idea of where her life is going next save for, of course, impending motherhood.
That’s a LOT to deal with and while Poppy has always been the sort of person to take the bull by the horns, work-wise at least, she feels oddly disempowered, at least at first, her state of mind not helped when she drives into town for her first appointment at the hospital in Orange and grabs the only spot left in the carpark which just happens to be for mothers with prams.
‘Yes, I’m good … good,’ she repeated, nodding her head. Was she good? She couldn’t tell. She felt okay at this precise moment, with a sleeping baby and the relief of no pain and an expert at her side in case things went wrong, but would she be okay if any one of these variables changed?
She’s desperate so she takes it despite feeling a little guilty but as she’s getting out of the car, a hospital employee in scrubs rather vociferously tells her she can’t park there.
She’s in such a stressed, hot and sweaty state that she takes him on and tells him in no uncertain terms that she’s taking it, that she’s practically a mum so it’s not exactly like she has no right to it and she marches into her appointment with her midwife Wenda.
But then life intervenes and Wenda has to hand Poppy over to her colleague who is, yep, you guessed it, shouty, strident carpark man who is named James and who treats her as just another client to be got quickly and dispassionately through the birthing process.
It’s very much a Pillow Talk meet-cute, and just Doris Day and Rock Hudson who go from telephony enemies to lovers, you just know Poppy and James are going to find something special in each other.
Well, eventually.
But at the beginning of Special Delivery, it’s not looking good with Poppy and James squaring off at 40 paces and convinced that neither has anything the other wants (except for delivering darling little Maeve who is born rather suddenly, upending Poppy’s world in the best possibly ways).
It’s a classic enemies-to-lovers kickoff to what turns out to be a robustly clever, charmingly sweet and emotionally real romcom where life is hard, people are difficult and yet somehow happy endings are possible.
(courtesy official author site)
There are a number of key things that makes Special Delivery a cut above the usual novel romcom.
For a start, the characters are fulsomely and wonderfully realised; everyone from Poppy herself to James to Dani to Poppy’s old school friend (and onetime high school boyfriend) Henry and a host of other memorable players are given so much fullness of character that you feel like they are living, breathing real people living it all out in front of you.
Of course, every book’s characters should feel just like this but they often don’t and the joy of Special Delivery is that you feel immersed in a very real and honest world that rather happily takes place in this reviewer’s home country of Australia, and in particular country NSW from which I hail.
Going hand in hand with this rich characterisation is dialogue that pops and sizzles and absolutely feel like words that real people could potentially utter; granted, no one in the real world is quite this articulate all the time but then romcoms always feel a little hyper-realistic and so the dialogue works perfectly in this genre setting.
The thing is that at no time do the conversations the characters have feel forced or so expositionally dense you feel as if they’re reading off a script; it all feels like something you’d expect someone in the situations to say, often adorned with a real wit and vibrancy that makes reading the dialogue a real pleasure.
She wished there wasn’t so much goodness in him. With the afternoon light streaming through her window and he memory of his hands on her skin, she couldn’t remember how she’d managed to hate him so much. All the same, a pit of dread was deepening in her stomach. It was very unlikely this would end well.
Special Delivery‘s other great strength is that while, yes, the brewing romance between Poppy and James, which takes a long while to get going – it feels perfectly paced and very much in keeping with what would happen if two people thought each other was the worst and then began to slowly, but surely, change their minds – is the central part of the narrative, it doesn’t elbow everything else aside.
There’s plenty of highly rewarding time to explore what single motherhood is like for Poppy, for her to spend quality time with her mum and dad, and to see her become part of a town that at first feels nothing like the place in which she grew up or where she’ll likely spend her adult years.
We are witness to Poppy becomes close and lovely friends with her 89-year-old neighbour, Mary, read along as she forms friendships and elevates and sinks her life in equal measure, and as she settles into what life means when it’s on her terms and not someone else’s.
It’s a rich, fulfilling story of self realisation and growth but more than that, it’s a chance to get to know Poppy as a person without James and to enjoy her life blooming and developing so that when she does fall in love and that fateful, pivotal conversation is had, it feels like a wondrously good addition to her life, and not all of it.
Too often romcoms act as if the act of falling in love is all and everything but it’s not and Special Delivery acknowledges to such a wonderful extent that by the time love takes its natural, if bumpy course, Poppy is her own person, standing on her own two feet and her new relationship is just the romantic icing on the cake of a very new life that’s looking very good indeed.