Book Lovers
First paragraph: PROLOGUE. When books are your life—or in my case, your job—you get pretty good at guessing where a story is going. The tropes, the archetypes, the common plot twists all start to organize themselves into a catalogue inside your brain, divided by category and genre.
Synopsis from the back-cover: Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.
Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.
If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.
Book Lovers is the first book I’ve read by Emily Henry and it’s also the first romance novel after almost a decade of hiatus from reading this genre. Did I regret succumbing to reading a (bookish) rom-com this Swedish summer? Not one bit!
The protagonist, Nora Stephens, is a successful book agent who lives in New York. She has had a series of unsuccessful relationships followed by breakups despite her best effort in screening them. Her character is seen as a hard-headed (stubborn?) woman, determined, and organized, and because of this, she also shows extreme care and loyalty to the authors she represents. In this story, Dusty is the author she is representing. Who, then, is the male antagonist? Charlie Lastra is the answer and he is—as the synopsis above suggested—a bookish brooding editor.
There are quite a few things to be discovered about Nora and Charlie, and the premise where the story unfolds—not New York where it all begins, of course—but in the idyllic Sunshine Falls where Nora (during her holiday with her sister Libby) spotted Charlie. But what is city Charlie doing in a place like Sunshine Falls? Her dodging him there finally comes to an end at some point and they start interacting more. Dusty’s new book brings them closer together. New kinds of tension start to build up—the sizzling kind but also conflicting. It’s complicated.
I love the banter between the two bookish characters Nora and Charlie. Things and people don’t always seem the way they look externally or how we perceive them. Dreams and hope, family and love, book-themed romance—this novel ticks all the boxes for me and it made me shed tears.
I can’t help but also automatically relate some of the words I read in this rom-com novel to my work:
[…] workshopping other people’s stories more. I like the puzzle of it. Looking at all the pieces and figuring out what something’s trying to be, and how to get it there.
and this:
I almost hated to miss work today, but if I’m going to be out of the office, at least I’ll still be surrounded by words.
