Book Review: Meg Cabot’s The Boy Is Back
Book review Wednesday strikes on Thursday. Shaking it up, here.
I haven’t read a lot of graphic novels, but I like the freshness of them. The Boy is Back, Meg Cabot’s latest foray into adult romance isn’t exactly a graphic novel, but the format is so much fun it made me laugh out loud.
One of the challenges of writing romances is finding the balance between the way people communicate in books and the way they communicate in real life.
Which is, of course, the point.
Alfred Hitchcock famously said, “What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?”
Fiction writers are encouraged to focus on the extraordinary moments of otherwise ordinary lives. But sometimes it’s a relief to read a book which describes the prosaic with the level of joy and appreciation which The Boy is Back exhibits. There is a pivotal love story but the ordinary life around the couple is almost a third character.
And a very special thank you to Cabot for the family tree at the very beginning of the book. There is a special place on the aggravating book shelf for the other kind.
You know. The ones in which you struggle through three hundred plus pages trying to remember just how Henry is related to the main character. You only learn he is her long lost step uncle when you stumble on an appendix on page 327.
There must be some readers out there who leaf through a book ahead of time marking appendices and footnotes with unseemly relish. I’m not one of them.
Which makes me wonder about who those people are and what else they do with their time. Dust moldings daily? Fold their dirty laundry before heading to the Laundromat? Use partitioned plates for meals so the green beans don’t touch the mashed potatoes?
I like a sense of organization, but I am well aware it is a losing battle. And I like books which reflect that. Hence this book review.
Cabot cleverly mimics the pace of online communication. It’s not a gimmick – it’s a device. And it’s a believable device. Most of us do communicate this way now, although perhaps not all as intensely as the family in this story does.
And while what she describes in those communications is ordinary life, she does so with such vigor and particularity, it is anything but dull.
Rose Grey has written three romance novels and is hard at work on a fourth. Wednesday is generally book review day. Unless it isn’t. If you liked this post, come visit the rest of the blog at www.rosegreybooks.com. Hot Pursuit and Not As Advertised are available as ebooks and as paperbacks online.
