A first rate second chance romance.
Plot: Dani is a late bloomer. Dealing with severe health issues as a kid has left her parents overprotective and her world was narrowed to meeting her physical needs, but others’ emotional needs. Still, after a bad breakup and a job loss, she finds herself taking on an opportunity to work for a start up in Amsterdam, an ocean away from her loving but controlling parents. Unfortunately, her cloistered childhood has left her without some necessary real world skills, and Dani’s start in Amsterdam is therefore anything but optimal. As it turns out though, the exchange student her family hosted for a year a decade ago, who she briefly dated, is from here. So it is perhaps not a complete surprise that they bump into each other. Shenanigans ensue.
Sometimes, timing is everything. In the book, Dani and Wouter connect when they’re teens, but they are not ready for the kind of commitment a real relationship takes. In reality, I had literally just DNF’d another book about an under 5ft Jewish woman with special needs looking for love, and by complete fluke this was the next book I picked up. And I think the contrast significantly affected my enjoyment of this book. I think if I had gone into this first, I might have struggled more with Dani’s lack of awareness of others, of her naiveté, and how undeveloped she is for a 30 year old woman. But having literally just come from a book that had a main character who was also all those things, but was also making it everyone else’s problem and her hero was literally a dude who was willing to do literally everything for her without her asking and she gives him movie recommendations in return, it was easier for me to sit with Dani until those frustrations fell away.
Because Dani works. She’s lived a small life, by necessity, and hasn’t had the same breadth of experience most people her age would. Her health still constrains her ambition, but fuck is she trying as hard as she can to push past her obstacles. She is naive and not extremely thoughtful, but she is out here doing the work of becoming a better person, and more fully herself. Sometimes, relationships can be uneven, but that is not always inherently troublesome. Something I often have to remind myself as I have some complex health issues that limit me in ways they do not limit my husband, leaving him to sometimes do more than what I consider his fair share in managing our lives. Balancing asserting one’s independence in the face of risks others don’t face with not becoming over-reliant on and infantalized by others (and yourself) is a very difficult one to strike, and pitfalls are inevitable. I think this is true for everyone, but especially true for those of us with health issues that mean we just literally can’t do stuff other people can, or not as well, or not for as long. It takes a special sort of person to not only love us, and support us, but not stick us in a little box either. To let us take risks, and make mistakes, and maybe help us challenge some of those preconceptions we have about what we can and can’t do.
This book isn’t perfect. There is some of what I’d consider wildly needless drama in the third act, and I think there are some culture clashes in the book that wouldn’t have resolved as quickly or amicably in real life (there’s a reason Americans have, for decades, been traveling with Canadian flags on their bags), but these are fairly minor quibbles.
Last complaint – this cover. What the actual fuck. Dani has a huge birthmark on her cheek and Wouter has thinning hair. Also Dani is under 5 feet. Literally who are these total randos on the cover? Zero stars.