Once upon a time, I told a story about myself. And maybe if I can make some of that story come true—Buzzard’s Neck, The Bend, whatever—I’ll be closer to writing a new one.
Much like how I’m finding younger heroines less relatable, I think I’ve also reached the point in my reading life where perfect/mostly perfect main characters are no longer that interesting to me. True, the saintly, virginal, personifications of perfection that populated many of the books that blooded me (as the folks over at Fated Mates would say), are (thankfully) harder to find nowadays, but they’re still there, hidden in tropes: As Sunshines that never have cloudy days or as best-friend’s baby sisters who only ever look at the hero as if he’s the sunshine she’s been missing. And I just… don’t have time for them. Let them live their bliss-filed, untraumatized lives, and more power to them. But give me a heroine who has had the shit kicked out of her and is ready to kick back. Give me a heroine who grumbles in the morning because she stayed up to late on her phone, or just doesn’t have it in her to be everybody’s emotional support human today.
Give me a heroine who is leading an ordinary, everyday life, and has done everything right, and still isn’t where or who she wants to be, and has no idea why, or how to get there. Enter Georgie, of Kate Clayborn’s Georgie All Along.
If you read romance, you’ve probably already met her, but I’m also the kind of perverse reader that the more I see a book floating around the less… particular parts of the book-internet, the more I am convinced it won’t be for me, so here I am reading it a year or so later than everybody else, and having nobody else to blame for this but myself. But here I am, ready to jump on the bandwagon & declare Georgie has another BFF, because
Second of all, in a Hallmark movie, no one ever has a hot affair. They open up a bakery and then get married six months later, and to me that sounds like the worst.
Yes, girl, yes. Absolute SAME.
Georgie is the kind of person that everybody around her can see how special she is, how amazing she is, but she’s completely blind to it, unless she’s helping. Unless she’s doing her job to perfection, being the absolute best friend on the planet, the best daughter, the Most Everything, All The Time. So when her job ends, and her BFF seems like she doesn’t need her right now, and her parents seem to have their lives together better than she does, what the hell comes next? And well: Hard relate, yet again.
Watching her figure it out, as she does a sort of reverse bucket list based on her high school self-insert fic, may be the basic plot of the story, but it feels like so much more. Watching her fall in love – with her life, with an actual human man (as opposed to her teenage heartthrob crush), and watching him fall in love with her back – may be the basic beats of the plot, but Clayborn plays the beats like a rock star. Hilarious nonsense scenes that would be welcome in any romcom; the dope of a man f’ing things up, repeatedly, and recognizing Georgie might not be willing or able to give him another chance; the tenderness of a best-friend bond that’s weathered a lot of years, but has to figure out how to rearrange itself now that one of them is married and expecting – all are handled with such care that I just kept getting that feeling like when you are a kid and you physically hug your book, you’re so glad your friends inside are going to be ok.
Highly recommend, obviously. Also? The swoony part, in case you were wondering? In true ‘he falls first’ fashion, it’s when we’re barely halfway through the book and the hero thinks this:
“You want this?” “Yes,” she says, then repeats it after she kisses me again, “Yes,” breathy and insistent. I love the way she says that yes. I decide I ought to find out everything in life she wants to say yes to, so I can hear it over and over again. Ice cream, a vacation, a piece of jewelry, a night out, a new house, whatever. You want this? Yes, yes.