Had my mother pulled the same stunt Georgie’s did with her step-sister Heather, calling me on my phone rather than just (Rowell sort of does for that word what John Green did for “okay” and I kind of hate her for her it on account of it’s just about half my vocabulary) getting my attention in person (being just downstairs; there’s that word again…), which she’d done once already moments before I’d peeled off the dust jacket (for safe keeping) and started reading, this is how I picture it would’ve went down:
I don’t know that I could’ve kicked things off with a messier opening sentence, but I digress. Nothing was allowed to interrupt or infringe upon my reading time reading time. My phone alerted me, with the most jarring alert tone imaginable, of a tornado warning, telling me to seek shelter, and, after a cursory glance out my window to assess matters, I shrugged it off thinking, if this is how I’m going to go, I might as well try and finish Landline before the tornado hits. Beside, as they taught us in elementary and high school, a book is akin to Captain America’s shield in that it can stop anything and everything in the case of a weather emergency.
All I was willing to let tear me away from Rainbow Rowell’s latest was snapping pictures of key quotes for use in this review. These quotes run the gamut from non sequiturs (“Georgie’s mom had spectacular cleavage. Tan, freckled, ten miles deep.” – The opening lines of Chapter 7) to putting into words what you thought couldn’t be (“Neal didn’t take Georgie’s breath away. Maybe the opposite. But that was okay—that was really good, actually, to be near someone who filled your lungs with air.”) to making you feel and understand their love as if it were your own (“He kissed her like he was drawing a perfectly straight line. He kissed her in India ink.”) to truths you didn’t know were truths until she lays them on you:
“How’d you know he was the one?”
“It’s not like that,” Georgie said. ‘You”ll see. It’s more like you meet someone, and you fall in love, and you have to put down your chips. You just have to make a commitment and hope that you’re right.”
“No one else describes love that way,” Heather frowned. “Maybe you’re doing it wrong.”
“Obviously I’m doing it wrong,” Georgie said. “But I still think love feels that way for most people.”
“So you think most people bet everything, their whole lives, on hope. Just hoping that what they’re feeling is real.”
“Real isn’t relevant,” Georgie said, turning completely to face heather. “It’s like … you’re tossing a ball between you, and you’re just hoping you can keep it in the air. And it has nothing to do with whether you love each other or not. If you didn’t love each other, you wouldn’t be playing this stupid game with the ball. You love each other—and you just hope you can keep the ball in play.”
Having included that excerpt, I honestly feel I’ve shown and said enough to justify my complete and utter disregard for anything my mother, the National Weather Service, Facebook, Papa John’s, or the library thinks is so important they had to try and pull a Kanye, something else I’ll forever tie to Rainbow Rowell for obvious reasons:
Shifting subjects momentarily, can every chapter in Rainbow Rowell’s next book be prefaced by a Simini Blocker illustration, ala the Harry Potter books? Like Opeth and Travis Smith (who I, unfortunately, share nothing but a name with), the two seem to share one vision. Then again, I don’t know if I could handle that much pretty because Olga Grlic’s covers are already plenty pretty.
Back to Landline, I wasn’t sure what to expect when Rowell stressed it was an adult book, but having finished it I can see the difference between this and her YA work. She’s dealt with serious issues in the past, particularly in Eleanor & Park. Here, though, that’s the entire book; for the first time, she doesn’t cut things short, so to speak, by leaving matters open-ended, yet that doesn’t make the ending any less uncertain. As Georgie lays out so perfectly in that lengthy excerpt I included, with love there is no knowing, there is no real, there is only hope, and your take on how things end for Georgie and Neal is wholly dependent upon how much you have. Rowell refuses to write a cut-and-dry “happy ending,” just as she refuses to shy away from things, issues that matter. She’s Boy Meets World, concluding things with a question mark and refusing to neglect the “bitter” part of “bittersweet,” not Full House, where, like on Whose Line is it Anyway? “everything you see is made up and the points don’t matter” because they’re too treacly, too restrained to get at anything of worth or importance.
For that, I commend her. For that, I now consider her what I had already suspected she became two books ago, my favorite author. All four of her books were read cover to cover, with me only allowing breaks for necessary human requirements such as sleep and sustenance. All four of her books were like falling in love as John Green, the YA It Boy to Rowell’s YA It Girl, put it: “slowly, and then all at once.” All four of her books reawaken the kid who, one night in elementary school, stayed up reading one of the Chronicles of Narnia books until midnight on a school night, passed out for an hour, then woke up and read until he had to leave for school. Rainbow Rowell, you have my complete, unflagging devotion, which is something I rarely say. It’s only you, Pixar, The Reign of Kindo, and Wes Anderson. One of you is bound to trip up eventually, yet I honestly can’t envision it happening, not anytime soon. With you all, the only drawback is it’ll never be enough, and I mean that in the best way possible. With Landline, like all of your other books, Rainbow Rowell, you leave me wanting more… and I love it.