(courtesy Hachette Australia)
We are in love with the road to love being quick, instant and one hundred percent assured.
That’s why most romantic comedies strike a chord with us because they say you can have love, it will be immediately recognisable and there will be no guesswork at all involved.
In a world full of uncertainty and guesswork, especially when it comes to matters of the heart, that’s a seductive idea, but even though losing yourself in escapist stories isn’t ever a bad thing, isn’t there some part of us that wants to believe it can all be real too?
There is, but as The Book Swap by Tessa Bickers makes richly and affectingly clear, all that realness means that falling in love can be tricky and difficult, its momentum, seemingly unstoppable in most rom coms, foundering often on the quirks, fallibilities and traumas that we all carry.
It’s like seeing a finish line, its promise glittering enticingly in the near distance, but then realising that to get there, you’ll have to scale a mountain, a fetid swamp and go down into and out of an abyss of the deepest and scariest proportions.
We still want to get there but damn if it isn’t going to be greatest and most terrifying trip of our lives, one with no guarantee of success and which could just as easily go hideously wrong as gloriously right.
I yank open the little cabinet door, scanning the spines. I can see some of the ones I donated, and that fills me with the smallest bit of hope. It’s got to be here — but I pull the front row of books out to look behind them, I know it isn’t.
It’s gone, and the last thing Bonnie ever gave me has gone with it.
On paper, and yes, that’s quite literal in this sense (at least for this reviewer), The Book Swap should be one of those easy-peasy romps towards instant and total love as two strangers begin to swap notes in the margins of books left in one of those cute, small street libraries that are happily popping up everywhere.
It begins with Erin, lost in a fog of grief at the loss of her best friend Bonnie some years earlier to cancer, accidentally donating her heavily annotated favourite book in said street library.
Not only does it has a lifetime of literary observations in it, but it also has her BFF’s final words to her tucked safely inside, and she needs to track it down however she can.
In comes James at that point who finds Erin’s book in the community street library, and who responds to many of her notes before putting the book back in there for Erin, he hopes, to find.
This being a rom com where hopes and dreams have a better than average chance of coming true, she does indeed find both the book and James’s comments and so begins a delightfully light and fun, and then heartfelt and intimate conversation between two strangers who must fight off other library users (sometimes almost literally) to get the book in which the latest discussion is taking place.
So many books are roped into this discussion, all of them classics, and all of them vessels for this nascent relationship which is as much a love letter to books as it is to romance itself.
(courtesy official author site)
But instead of a quick and easy ride to happy-ever-after, which you might expect given the buoyancy of Erin and James’s exchanges, what The Book Swap offers, and in ways so extraordinarily emotionally honest and movingly intimate that you will gasp as much as you swoon, is an instructive lesson in the fact that falling in love, though wondrously otherworldly and good, does not immediately wipe the past away or cancel out the broken bits of our humanity.
And there’s a good chance it may not manage to do it at all.
Because while Erin and James find a soulmate in each other’s margin notes, and a diversion from some fairly big existential questions that are preoccupying their present lives, they unknowingly have a shared history, and it’s not a good one.
It’s so bad, in fact, that when they discover who each other is, there’s a very good chance that Erin, on the cusp of some major self-realisation and life changes, might simply walk away, unable to forgive James for some great sins in the past which, truth be told, are actually quite as damning as she has led herself to believe.
What unfurls then in The Book Swap, quite beautifully, and with so empathetic heart, is a battle for love to triumph over a lifetime of hurt and resent, to succeed where only self sabotage and anchor have found any purchase to date and where it’s quite possible nothing good might ever exist again.
‘There isn’t a disconnection in the world that can’t be healed by forgiveness,’ he starts, quoting the moment where the protagonist realises she needs to stop blaming her family for her mental health. It’s a poetic and beautiful piece of writing.
We lock eyes and laugh, the way we used to in class sometimes. I’d look at him and think about the joy he seemed to get from teaching. One day, I think. One day, I want a job like that.
What will Erin do? How will James react? Can you ever forget and forgive a traumatic past, even when a totally innocent and heartfelt exchange points to the fact that maybe the person you have damned for all time may in fact not be as bad as you thought them to be?
They are all questions swirling in and through the hopeful but often grimly truthful narrative of The Book Swap which offers the fluttering butterflies of love in the nascent ascendant but with a compelling side order of life as it actually is.
Love might find a way in this novel of “second chances and new beginnings” but it’s going to have its work cut out for it, with Erin in particular unable to get past the fact that James, in her eyes at least, did some terrible things that can’t be erased even by margin notes that suggest someone with a truly kind, insightful and selfless heart.
Will love find a way where trauma and grief cannot?
You suspect so, but The Book Swap does not make it easy and that you get is an upliftingly real and honest story that delivers all the feels and romantic possibility you could want but all couched in the truthfulness and brokenness of life.
We might want light, escapist and easy love, and honestly given how much life makes us work for anything, that is no bad thing to wish for, but The Book Swap makes us realise that working hard for it is a wondrously good thing too and that finding love when it’s so hard to get to may have all kinds of healing benefits which will change us in ways that will change our lives forever.