A new love is more fun to experience than to hear second hand from a friend – but the friend is usually better able to observe the pitfalls of your new relationship. The genius of the romantic genre is that it offers the reader both the first-person feelings and the second-person perspective at the same time. Unfortunately, it also makes only plot summaries sound hollow, lacking the irreducible emotional resonance of the reading experience.
So if I tell you that Cat Sebastian’s new mid-century queer historical, WE CAN BE SO GOOD (Avon, 384 pp., paperback, $18.99), is about two New York reporters who meet at work, become friends, move in together and fall in love. Please understand that it’s not about the events, it’s about going through it. And the walking through is great: at one point one character makes some soup, and later another character makes more soup, and here I am crying and kneeling because the reader knows what that soup is. resources.
This is a book where the small, everyday decisions – feeding a stray cat, offering a friend a guest room, taking flowers home with the groceries – loom large because they are how we connect with others. The reader is welcomed into a pair of lives as they become one shared world: Nick, slovenly and defensive with a caring streak he would die before acknowledging, and Andy, the emperor of abandonment issues, whose future as a publisher could hold a chance. if he wasn’t so afraid of it.
Alien oppression, the civil rights movement, white supremacy – these are tangible contexts in this novel, but they are not the subject. The subject: joy as praxis, love as liberation. You can’t do the big rebellions if you can’t start with the small ones.
Continuing the theme of rebellion: Contemporary Austen adaptations are exercises in seeing how far a tradition can be stretched without breaking. That fits very well with a Muslim author who writes about religious characters; Uzma Jalaluddin’s debut, ‘Ayesha at Last’ was one of the most refreshing ‘Pride and Prejudice’ recordings in decades, just like Joel Kim Booster’s movie ‘Fire Island’. For her third novel MANY ASSIGNMENT ABOUT NADA (Berkley, 320 pp., paperback, $16.99), she takes over my favorite book by Austen, ‘Persuasion’. And, frankly, it knocks it clean out of the park.
The elements are familiar: future technical engineer Nada meets her ex, Baz, a musician and conference organizer; they are forced together despite their long-held grudges and eventually come to a fuller understanding of their past and present selves. Jalaluddin beautifully translates Austen’s pervasive social constraints into the insular, somewhat conservative dating world of first- and second-generation Muslim immigrants, where reputations can be shattered in an afternoon and matchmaking is seen as a competitive sport.
“Conviction” retellings, like all second-chance novels, need to strike a balance between a breach serious enough to last for years and a resolution that gives the reader confidence that those issues have been overcome. It’s hard for me to think of a time I’ve seen it done so elegantly — Sherry Thomas’s “Not Quite a Husband,” perhaps, or Farrah Rochon’s “Cherish Me” — and when the reveal came, I gasped out loud . In a word, it’s brilliant.
If you were disappointed in Dakota Johnson’s adaptation last year, Jalaluddin will heal the pain. This book lays a steady tension of melancholy under messy and funny top notes – one of those romances where you feel the whole journey, all the little moments piling up into something roaringly powerful, like snowflakes forming an avalanche.
Avalanche is also a fitting word for the way genre trends can hurtle down the mountainside and sweep everything else before them. Lately the portmanteau on everyone’s lips is “romance” – as in romantic fantasy – and I see the term aside, but I love the results. Psychics are always with us, but the current crop has a lightness that harks back to 1990s fantasies like Shanna Swendson’s “Enchanted, Inc.” or Karen Harbaugh’s Regency ballrooms teeming with vampire viscounts and amorous Greek gods.
This summer’s sweetest treat, and a rom-com worthy of the title, is JC Cervantes THE ENCHANTED HACIENDA (Park Row, 368 pp., $30). Harlow Estrada tries to fulfill her publishing dreams in New York, but an unexpected job loss and a nasty breakup with a worse boyfriend send her fleeing home to her family’s flower farm in El Viento, Mexico.
However, the Estrada women are no ordinary florists: they grow magical flowers that are used for truth serums, memory erasers and dangerous, desirable love potions. Soon, Harlow gets caught up in the delivery of a bond bouquet for an elderly couple and flirts with the attractive, mysterious grandson of the bouquet customer. But is it real love? Or is there a hidden flower enchantment that tricks Harlow and Ben into falling in love?
This book is like dunking your brain in a jar of serotonin. It’s hilarious in the beginning, heartbreaking by the end, and full of places you’ll want to dive into and never leave. If it’s not as edgy as Sangu Mandanna’s “The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches,” it’s certainly sexier: Everything is flowers and leaves and food and dreams and drink.
Mandanna’s book focused on the future, asking what we owe to the children we raise in the world; Cervantes’ romance is about what we inherited from the past and how we let it dictate the course of our lives. Are traditions sources of power, or snares that demand sacrifices from our hopes and dreams? How can we align our needs as individuals with the demands of a family, even a loving family? How do we recover from the devastation when we lose those we love? These are simple questions, but they are simple as a knife is simple, and Cervantes makes their sharpness palpable. Perfect for skinning your heart open on a summer afternoon, with a glass of something cool to ease the sting.
