Two days before Christmas, Georgie tells her husband Neal that she can’t go with him and their two daughters to spend Christmas with his family in Omaha. A tremendous opportunity has come up for her and her writing partner, Seth, and they have to stay in L.A. and write six episodes of their new television show. After Neal leaves, Georgie begins to fear that she’s damaged her marriage beyond repair. But at her mother’s house, she finds that if she calls using her mother’s rotary phone, she can communicate with Neal in the past. Neal before they got married. And she wonders if she’s been given a second chance to make her marriage work.

Eleanor and Park is a romance novel that punches way, way above its weight. Fangirl is an exploration of fan culture and independence that ditto although not quite as consistently or strongly. Landline doesn’t do that. Landline punches its weight. Handily. But your expectations are different for an adult novel; or rather, your expectations are different for adults. When Rowell treats Georgie’s career and marriage and feelings as important, it doesn’t feel surprising, because adult careers are important and adult relationships can (though often don’t) last a lifetime.

I think this says something interesting about memory and childhood, though. I am wont to devalue the feelings I felt very strongly as a teenager. Like, oh Past Jenny was horribly insecure about her knees and cried when she put on a dress. What a dope. Now that I no longer feel that way, it’s very easy to see that feeling and think She was being histrionic. Which I was. For sure. But I think because we all go through that genre of problem, and overwhelmingly we figure out how to manage it, we can often look at teenagers and their teenager problems and see those problems as pre-solved, and thus less important and scary than the problems we are now currently facing as adults. Real, but real with an expiration date. Real but with lots of cushions and second chances. And very often, real but predictable: You are a teenager and you do not yet know [x information or life experience], and not only do you not know it, but you do not know how thoroughly you eventually will know it.

So I think when a young adult author writes (like Rainbow Rowell does) about young adult problems in a way that is utterly sincere but not histrionic, and makes those problems seem new, and you remember that while this was happening to you, it was everything, you respond to that differently. That is a harder trick to pull off.

But Landline is charming and lovable in its own way. If I hadn’t had expectations from Eleanor and Park, I’d probably have given it an extra star. Georgie and Neal and Georgie’s sister, Heather, who follows Georgie around the house badgering her with questions about her marriage, are all wonderful characters. And the phone conversations Georgie has with Past Neal, and her memories of meeting and falling in love with Past Neal — all quite lovely. I could see why they loved each other, and I could see why they had struggled to keep their marriage a happy one.

The end of the book doesn’t resolve any of this, exactly, which I liked. I liked it that the conclusion Georgie reaches is that she has to be more deliberate about her marriage, the way she’s deliberate about her work. She can’t give it half-effort and trust that it’ll still be there waiting for her. Sometimes, even when it means letting go of work stuff, she has to give it everything she’s got. (PS I was seriously worried that Georgie was going to get trapped in too-deep snow in that scene at the end, like that story my mother tells about being a kid and getting trapped in too-deep snow and thinking, This is the stupidest thing I have ever done, and this is how I’m going to die.)

A failing for me was that Seth, Georgie’s lifelong writing partner and best friend, and a major source of stress to her marriage, doesn’t ever come into focus. We don’t see him being funny with Georgie in the way that they say they’re funny together, and I just really didn’t know what the pith of their friendship was, without that. To me, they didn’t have the same rhythm back and forth that Georgie and Neal had, when by the rules of the book they should have had that far more, since they are the writing partners and Neal is the strong silent type.

Altogether, though, it was a dear of a book. Not Eleanor and Park dear, but a lovely read and one I enjoyed immensely.

They read it too: things mean a lot. Rhapsody in Books. Capricious Reader. Chrisbookarama. Good Books and Good Wine. Open Letters Monthly. Tor.com. And here’s Janet Maslin singing Landline’s praises for the New York Times. Tell me if I missed your review, and I’ll add a link!

If you’re an audiobook guy and you’re trying to decide whether to give Landline a try, check out a clip from the audiobook on SoundCloud, from Macmillan Audio!

The post Landline, Rainbow Rowell appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 10

Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We will appreciate it very very much).

If you want to skip around, here are the contents of the podcast:

Starting at 1:07: We explain why we didn’t read The Goldfinch. It is for good reasons. We got terribly ill. Instead we read comfort books, a list of which I have included below because you should read all of these.

Gin Jenny’s Comfort Books

The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer, is a particularly good example of a story in which the heroine puts everything into good order. Whiskey Jenny also wants you all to know about the Richard Armitage-read audiobooks of Georgette Heyer books that exist.

A Candle for St. Jude, by Rumer Godden

The Family Man, by Elinor Lipman (I’ve talked about it before here)

James Herriot’s books about being a vet in Yorkshire: the first one is All Creatures Great and Small, and this is on Whiskey Jenny’s list too

L. M. Montgomery’s books, pretty much all of them, but The Blue Castle is particularly underappreciated and great

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke

Tam Lin, Pamela Dean

Dorothy Sayer’s Strong Poison and Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night

Whiskey Jenny’s Comfort Books

Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine

The Rose and the Ring, William Makepeace Thackeray

Anne of Green Gables series, L. M. Montgomery

An Old-Fashioned Girl, Louisa May Alcott

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett; but particularly, the recording of it by Claire Bloom

The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas

The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy

James Herriot books again!

Watership Down, Richard Adams

Roald Dahl

Josephine Tey

The Perilous Gard, Elizabeth Marie Pope

Share your comfort book lists with us, please!

Starting at 18:05: We review Listen to the Nightingale. If you listen closely you may detect that it meant a lot to me for Whiskey Jenny to enjoy this book AND SHE DID BECAUSE OF COURSE.

Starting at 30:54: We talk about scary books! Neither of us is an enormous connoisseur of scary books, so we will accept your recommendations for scary books. Whiskey Jenny may not read them but I, Gin Jenny, will! As long as no serial killers!

Starting at 38:18: Listener mail! Listener Chris inquired how much of the end I typically read, so I explain.

Starting at 41:07: New segment will be about books we’re not reading for the podcast but are excited about, either because we are eagerly anticipating reading them, or because we are reading/have read them. We will have this in the future, and I am accepting proposals for what to call this segment. Nicholson Baker’s excellent The Anthologist (my review here) is getting a sequel, Traveling Sprinkler, and I am curious about it.

43:32: Closing remarks and outro

Credits
Photo credit: andreybl / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
Song is by Jeff MacDougall and comes from here.
The above links to books we’ve discussed are affiliate links. If you click on them and then buy a book from that website, I get a very small amount of money. This in no way influences my reviews.

The post Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.10: Comfort Books, Listen to the Nightingale, and Spooky Stories appeared first on Reading the End.