Review: Landline by Rainbow Rowell

Publication Date: July 3^rd 2015 (paperback)

Publisher: Orion
Length: 308 pages

Huge thanks to Netgalley and Orion for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review

Georgie McCool knows her marriage is in trouble; it has been in trouble for a long time. She still loves her husband, Neal, and Neal still loves her, deeply — but that almost seems beside the point now.
Maybe that was always beside the point.
Two days before they’re supposed to visit Neal’s family in Omaha for Christmas, Georgie tells Neal that she can’t go. She’s a TV writer, and something’s come up on her show; she has to stay in Los Angeles. She knows that Neal will be upset with her — Neal is always a little upset with Georgie — but she doesn't expect him to pack up the kids and go home without her.
When her husband and the kids leave for the airport, Georgie wonders if she’s finally done it. If she’s ruined everything.
That night, Georgie discovers a way to communicate with Neal in the past. It’s not time travel, not exactly, but she feels like she’s been given an opportunity to fix her marriage before it starts...
Is that what she’s supposed to do?
Or would Georgie and Neal be better off if their marriage never happened?

So the first Rainbow Rowell book I ever read was ‘Eleanor & Park’ and whilst I enjoyed it, it didn’t hit me in quite the same way as a lot of other people I know who loved it. So I wasn’t in any huge rush to pick up any of her other books, they were always on the ‘yeah, I’ll get to it at some point’ pile. And then I had a long train journey back home and Landline was on my kindle and I thought I should really try it and see.

Reading Landline was like being hit by a truck in the feels. On finishing it I was actually glad that I hadn’t read it before now, as I don’t think that it would have resonated with me in quite the same way. Having waited until now, when I’m coming up to my first wedding anniversary, it struck a lot of chords inside me. I may not have kids yet, or a high pressure job in tv and been married for 17 years, but I do have that fear. That worry that maybe love isn’t enough, and it was both heart-breaking and uplifting to read Georgie and Neal’s story and to see them battle through the little things and the big things together, because they loved each other and couldn’t imagine life without the other.

The writing is poetic and beautiful and orchestrated to perfection to provide maximum impact when reading. I fell into the story, into their lives and their memories and their love for each other and at times felt like I was buoyed by it and others like I was drowning. It is gut wrenching and stunning. Funny and tragic. Magical and utterly mundane. It gives you the insights into young Georgie who is full of certainty and love and determination and juxtaposes her against older Georgie who is worn and tired and desperately trying to juggle all of the balls at once and keeps missing.

"You don't know when you are twenty-three. You don’t know what it really means to crawl into someone else’s life and stay there. You can’t see all the ways you’re going to get tangled, how you’re going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating will feel in five years, in ten—in fifteen. When Georgie thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems."

I genuinely couldn’t see how this could end. Obviously I was hoping for hope and happiness, but I just wasn’t sure. I was filled with as much desperation, bewilderment and uncertainty as Georgie was as she remembered and re-remembered and tried to work out what to do. I stumbled off the train after reading and fell into my Husband’s arms, desperate for comfort and reassurance, I was so invested into Georgie’s story.

In short, this book is beautiful. A gorgeous melding of magic and reality, of hope and loss, but most importantly of love in all its many shapes and guises. I fell in love with Georgie and I fell in love with Landline and I think I may have just fallen for Rainbow. Now I’m itching to get into every other book she’s written, but I think Landline will always hold a special place in my heart, and be a book that I come back to over and over again for the little pieces of humour and wisdom and hope folded delicately into the prose.

Review: Midnight Crossroad by Charlaine Harris

Publication Date: 9^th April 2015 (paperback)
Publisher: Gollancz
Length: 305 pages

Huge thanks to Netgalley and Gollancz for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review
Welcome to Midnight, Texas, a town with many boarded-up windows and few full-time inhabitants, located at the crossing of Witch Light Road and Davy Road. It's a pretty standard dried-up western town.There's a pawnshop (someone lives in the basement and is seen only at night). There's a diner (people who are just passing through tend not to linger). And there's new resident Manfred Bernardo, who thinks he's found the perfect place to work in private (and who has secrets of his own).Stop at the one traffic light in town, and everything looks normal. Stay awhile, and learn the truth...

This book and I almost didn’t hit it off with the prologue, the slightly odd narrative style and over explanation/rambling details about staircases and windows and where doors were was incredibly off putting and I very nearly put the book down just a few pages in. However that felt like I wasn’t giving it a fair chance and I decided to at least see how the first few chapters went – at which point I was hooked…

This is my first foray into Harris’ writing, although I have watched a good deal of the TV show ‘True Blood’ and I was really caught off guard by it. The omnipresent narrative voice was something I haven’t found in a book in some time and it was fascinating. It really felt like it was almost the town itself telling the story, adding in odd little details about what people were doing on the other side of town. Fascinating, strange and a little jarring to get used to at first the writing style had moments of clunkiness, but on the whole it worked really well at sucking me in and hooking me into the story.

The real brilliance is in the sense of the town and the characters that Harris has created. She captures that small town atmosphere perfectly and I loved getting to know these people and the secrets they’ve been hiding – although it feels like there are still many more secrets left to uncover.
I feel in love with these characters without even realising it. They were such an odd and eclectic mix of people yet they make a truly amazing group. Whilst we got snippets from a lot of different residents there are still plenty of people left to find out more about and I genuinely cannot wait to get back to Midnight with the next book.

I also really loved that on the whole things weren’t spelled out for the reader. The people living here had known each other (and this world) for some time so things like vampires didn’t need explaining exactly. The reader was left to use their brain and keep up with the world as it unfolded without being spoonfed every detail, which I loved. So often you have unrealistic exposition so that the reader knows everything easily and it becomes jarring and irritating when the characters would have no real reason to do that. This meant my brain had to do some leg work and I had a couple of moments where my perception of the town had to shift to accommodate new information, but I loved that.

It was slightly frustrating to have worked out the killer at the point that they are first introduced, I think I may have read too many murder mysteries with twists! But despite the shock value being taken away from that I still really loved the puzzle as everyone tried to work out who the murderer was.

This is a really fantastic start to a new series, with a wonderfully eclectic cast of characters and a truly strange town they call home. I loved it and I cannot wait to get back to Midnight for more.