Book Lovers

Today I played around with making a mock trailer for my book review. I had a great time writing the music and setting it to picture. Hope you enjoy! Here is my synopsis and review:

“That’s the thing about women. There’s no good way to be one. Wear your emotions on your sleeve and you’re hysterical. Keep them tucked away where your boyfriend doesn’t have to tend to them and you’re a heartless bitch.”

Single high-powered literary agent Nora Stephens and her married full-time-mom sister Libby lost their mother while in their teens, and Nora has been trying to take care of Libby ever since. When Libby gets pregnant for the third time, she asks Nora to accompany her on a trip to a small town called Sunshine Falls, for some sisterly R&R. Sunshine Falls had been the setting for Nora’s client’s novel that Libby loved, and though Nora hates leaving New York City and her clients, she would do anything for her sister. Libby has ulterior motives for dragging Nora to this quaint town, including having Nora date some locals and a detailed checklist of charming small-town adventures:

“[Libby] looks up, eyes sparkling….[This list is] how we’re both going to be transformed via small-town magic into more relaxed versions of ourselves.’”

Soon after they arrive, Nora runs into Charlie Lastra, an editor with which she has had a humiliating experience two years prior. It turns out that Sunshine Falls is his home town, and he is back helping out his parents. Nora and Charlie begin working on a new novel featuring a protagonist they both recognize as the Cruella Deville-type work-obsessed emotionally-bereft character Nora is often compared to.

“’I know you’re a busy woman,’ he says. ‘I’ll let you get back to sharpening your knives and organizing your poison cabinet...’”

Sparks of every sort fly between Nora and Charlie who present like a pair of sharp-witted twins, as Nora divides her time between touring with her troubled sister in the evenings and falling for Charlie by day.

Their lives are complicated, and Nora knows she will never have the small-town romance novel happy ending her author clients write about:

“I’m the city person. Not the one who meets the hot farmer…. The other one. The uptight, manicured literary agent, reading manuscripts from atop her Peloton while a serene beach screen saver drifts, unnoticed, across her computer screen.”

New York feels like a character in the book:

“It's a truth universally acknowledged that cab drivers won’t clip people who look like this guy. His outfit says I am a man with a lawyer. Or possibly just I am a lawyer.”

…as does Sunshine Falls:

“The town comes into view all at once. One instant I’m on a crumbling road on the side of a mountain. And the next, Sunshine Falls is spread out beneath me like the set from an old western….”

What I loved best about Book Lovers by Emily Henry was the smart and clever banter between Nora and Charlie, and the deadpan humor of Nora and Libby. The dialogue reads like all the things you wished you had said in a sticky situation, but could never come up with in the moment. I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator, Julia Whelan, has a particularly piercing and sarcastic delivery that often had me laughing out loud.

Hardcover 384 pages, Audiobook 11 hours 23 minutes