I’ve made no secret of my dismissal of the romance genre. It’s not that I don’t enjoy romance, or am indifferent to love, it’s that I’ve found the heaving bosoms and overflowing adoration to be blindly fantastical and willfully dismissive of actual romance. I’ve generally avoided the genre because I’ve never thought of it as even adequately representing real world love. I know that bodice rippers aren’t all the genre has to offer, but I have never encounter romance that spoke to me.
Until Rainbow Rowell, that is.
Rainbow Rowell doesn’t fill her books with dense poetry. She isn’t a great writer in that sense. But she has such a strong and remarkable voice, she has a keen and precise ability to touch the core emotions of her characters, and present them with a crystalline brightness that cuts directly to their humanity. These characters feel alive, and these situations feel familiar, because Rowell is so adept at reminding us, the readers, of our own experiences. I don’t think she’s a great writer because of the way she strings words together, I think she’s a great writer because she knows how to directly tap into our shared experiences and make us unearth the emotions her characters are feeling. This book did more than remind me of what it’s like to be a nervous and self-conscious teenager falling in love for the first time, this book made me relive it.
I found this story achingly beautiful, and I found both characters remarkably authentic. Park felt like more than just a kid I could’ve grown up with and been friends with, he felt like me. I literally felt like Rowell was writing about my adolescence. And I knew versions of Eleanor growing up. Every page was a gift.
I’ve been sitting on this review for a few days now because I’ve been trying to encapsulate how much I loved it. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to. I cherish this book like I cherish my own memories. In between finishing this book and writing this review, I feel like all the wonderful thoughts and feelings I wanted to express have slipped through my fingers. Like the iridescent joy of teenage love, it’s hard to hold on to. Before you know what you really have, it’s gone. But if I were to sum up my experience, here, it would be with a song. That’s how I feel about this book. It’s beauty is both fragile and haunting.
When I first read Landline, I wanted to read Rowell’s other books to see if they were all that good. Fangirl was, but I feared I only loved it because I was still basking in the glow of the one I had just finished. Well, Eleanor & Park might be my favorite Rowell book, which means I’ve loved every word of hers so far. She’s so good, I’d read her grocery lists. I consider myself both fortunate to have three more ahead of me (though, I’m almost done with Attachments as I write this), and forlorn that there is so little left for me to enjoy.
But for now, for this brief period in time, I’m still basking in the warmth of this book.
Reviewed 25 times previously, with an average rating of 4.52. Among books with at least 10 reviews, this is the 8th highest rated (tied with Fangirl and The Martian by Andy Weir). It’s the highest rated with at least 20 reviews (still tied with the aforementioned books, however).