This was a cute, engaging chick lit romance, with some drawbacks.
Laura is in her late 20s, about the age of nearly every chick lit protagonist – still single and trying to find who she is, with her 30th birthday looming. Her mother was her best friend, but she died a few years earlier. Laura now works at an online magazine, specializing in interviewing couples on how they met one another. This only makes her feel lonelier, and like it’ll never happen for her. She pitches an idea to her hot-and-cold boss Suki that she could go back to the Channel Islands where her parents met, and recreate their love story, and to her surprise, Suki goes for it.
When Laura gets there, though, she accidentally picks up the wrong suitcase at the airport. She opens it, and believes from the serendipitous things inside that this case must belong to her dream man–and the universe has conspired to bring them together. She is determined to give it back to him in person. Meanwhile, local cab driver Ted agrees, after a rocky start to their relationship, to take her around the islands to all the places that had been meaningful to her parents’ love story.
As soon as Laura starts to notice how hot Ted was, I knew where this was going, but that didn’t make the process less enjoyable. Of course when she meets Jasper, “the suitcase man,” he’s perfect for her on paper in every way, because he had to be in order to give her a real choice. In the midst of this love triangle, Laura also learns that her parents’ love story wasn’t at all what she’d believed it to be, and she has to choose between pleasing her boss and being true to herself… all the typical elements of chick lit. All of this was fine. When Laura and Ted get together, there’s quite a bit of sex, but that’s kind of par for the course in the romantic culmination of most chick lit books too, and you can skip it (sort of, it comes back again later). The main surprise of the book comes after this, and made the whole thing overall a lot less predictable, though only for the last 30 minutes.
My only objection to the book was some of the subtle messaging. Laura’s job starts out being all about “happily ever afters,” and she’d always thought of her parents’ love story that way. At the end of the book, she’s led to what’s supposed to be a more realistic view that not everything ends happy, and that’s okay, and if all you have is now, you might as well enjoy now. It’s one thing to say, “enjoy the moment,” and that is *part* of the message… but the larger theme was that romance doesn’t last, and you should be okay with that. It’s very sad, and makes me wonder what our culture is settling for.
My rating: ***1/2
Language: it’s there. In some places it’s a lot, but it’s always done in a lighthearted manner. Does that help?
Violence: none
Sexual content: quite a bit, but it’s all concentrated at the end. Once you realize it’s coming you can skip the rest of that chapter… though it recurs in the next chapter too, some.
Political content: it’s there, and it’s peppered throughout – but it doesn’t influence the actual story. There’s just obvious references that make it seem like, “any decent person will admire this individual, or support this cause.” Which annoys me as kind of subtle brainwashing.
