Had my mother pulled the same stunt Georgie’s did with her step-sister Heather, calling me on my phone rather than just (Rowell sort of does for that word what John Green did for “okay” and I kind of hate her for her it on account of it’s just about half my vocabulary) getting my attention in person (being just downstairs; there’s that word again…), which she’d done once already moments before I’d peeled off the dust jacket (for safe keeping) and started reading, this is how I picture it would’ve went down:
I don’t know that I could’ve kicked things off with a messier opening sentence, but I digress. Nothing was allowed to interrupt or infringe upon my reading time reading time. My phone alerted me, with the most jarring alert tone imaginable, of a tornado warning, telling me to seek shelter, and, after a cursory glance out my window to assess matters, I shrugged it off thinking, if this is how I’m going to go, I might as well try and finish Landline before the tornado hits. Beside, as they taught us in elementary and high school, a book is akin to Captain America’s shield in that it can stop anything and everything in the case of a weather emergency.
All I was willing to let tear me away from Rainbow Rowell’s latest was snapping pictures of key quotes for use in this review. These quotes run the gamut from non sequiturs (“Georgie’s mom had spectacular cleavage. Tan, freckled, ten miles deep.” – The opening lines of Chapter 7) to putting into words what you thought couldn’t be (“Neal didn’t take Georgie’s breath away. Maybe the opposite. But that was okay—that was really good, actually, to be near someone who filled your lungs with air.”) to making you feel and understand their love as if it were your own (“He kissed her like he was drawing a perfectly straight line. He kissed her in India ink.”) to truths you didn’t know were truths until she lays them on you:
“How’d you know he was the one?”
“It’s not like that,” Georgie said. ‘You”ll see. It’s more like you meet someone, and you fall in love, and you have to put down your chips. You just have to make a commitment and hope that you’re right.”
“No one else describes love that way,” Heather frowned. “Maybe you’re doing it wrong.”
“Obviously I’m doing it wrong,” Georgie said. “But I still think love feels that way for most people.”
“So you think most people bet everything, their whole lives, on hope. Just hoping that what they’re feeling is real.”
“Real isn’t relevant,” Georgie said, turning completely to face heather. “It’s like … you’re tossing a ball between you, and you’re just hoping you can keep it in the air. And it has nothing to do with whether you love each other or not. If you didn’t love each other, you wouldn’t be playing this stupid game with the ball. You love each other—and you just hope you can keep the ball in play.”
Having included that excerpt, I honestly feel I’ve shown and said enough to justify my complete and utter disregard for anything my mother, the National Weather Service, Facebook, Papa John’s, or the library thinks is so important they had to try and pull a Kanye, something else I’ll forever tie to Rainbow Rowell for obvious reasons:
Shifting subjects momentarily, can every chapter in Rainbow Rowell’s next book be prefaced by a Simini Blocker illustration, ala the Harry Potter books? Like Opeth and Travis Smith (who I, unfortunately, share nothing but a name with), the two seem to share one vision. Then again, I don’t know if I could handle that much pretty because Olga Grlic’s covers are already plenty pretty.
Back to Landline, I wasn’t sure what to expect when Rowell stressed it was an adult book, but having finished it I can see the difference between this and her YA work. She’s dealt with serious issues in the past, particularly in Eleanor & Park. Here, though, that’s the entire book; for the first time, she doesn’t cut things short, so to speak, by leaving matters open-ended, yet that doesn’t make the ending any less uncertain. As Georgie lays out so perfectly in that lengthy excerpt I included, with love there is no knowing, there is no real, there is only hope, and your take on how things end for Georgie and Neal is wholly dependent upon how much you have. Rowell refuses to write a cut-and-dry “happy ending,” just as she refuses to shy away from things, issues that matter. She’s Boy Meets World, concluding things with a question mark and refusing to neglect the “bitter” part of “bittersweet,” not Full House, where, like on Whose Line is it Anyway? “everything you see is made up and the points don’t matter” because they’re too treacly, too restrained to get at anything of worth or importance.
For that, I commend her. For that, I now consider her what I had already suspected she became two books ago, my favorite author. All four of her books were read cover to cover, with me only allowing breaks for necessary human requirements such as sleep and sustenance. All four of her books were like falling in love as John Green, the YA It Boy to Rowell’s YA It Girl, put it: “slowly, and then all at once.” All four of her books reawaken the kid who, one night in elementary school, stayed up reading one of the Chronicles of Narnia books until midnight on a school night, passed out for an hour, then woke up and read until he had to leave for school. Rainbow Rowell, you have my complete, unflagging devotion, which is something I rarely say. It’s only you, Pixar, The Reign of Kindo, and Wes Anderson. One of you is bound to trip up eventually, yet I honestly can’t envision it happening, not anytime soon. With you all, the only drawback is it’ll never be enough, and I mean that in the best way possible. With Landline, like all of your other books, Rainbow Rowell, you leave me wanting more… and I love it.
Wonderful review. I cannot wait to read this one. The only rainbow Rowell book I have read so far was Eleanor and park, and that was so spectacular that I can’t wait to pick up the next one.
I thought Attachments was an adult book too? But I can see the distinction you’re making. I’m excited to dig into this one eventually, knowing that I will love it.
I could’ve sworn I read at some point or another that she was billing this as her first “adult” novel. Maybe I’m just misremembering or imagining things.
And you’ve only read one, Badkittyuno!? I envy you because I wish I had all of her books to read for the first time again. I also don’t understand how you haven’t read them all already! I read Eleanor & Park as soon as I was done with Attachments, the first book of hers I read.
This is, according to herself, her first adult novel since Attachments. Both Eleanor & Park and Fangirl are YA, although I suspect that the publishers would like to label Fangirl New Adult, since it deals with college kids. I definitely think it’s her most serious book to date.
I love that we’ve highlighted the same quotes! Her bit about Neil filling her lungs with air, and the India ink, I pretty much swooned when reading. This book took my breath away (like all of Rowell’s books). I literally had trouble breathing for parts of it. I’m so very glad that my husband and I are at a good place right now in our marriage, because if I’d read this about three and a half years ago, when we were a bit rocky, I think the book may have destroyed me.
I should have my review of this up in a few days. I just wanted to chime in with a great big YES to everything you say in your review. I frequently disagree with you a LOT (really, I can’t even with your rating of Sandman, among other things) but in the love for Rainbow Rowell, we are in perfect agreement. I devoured her book the same day I got it. I’m so glad it came out during the school holidays, or I might have had to call in sick to work just to be able to read it undisturbed.
Heh, I’m used to people disagreeing with me. I don’t like being the unintentional contrarian all the time! Though sometimes it is satisfying to tear into a book, like I did with Mr. Mercedes. They’re easier reviews to write than ones like this where it’s like you think it’s like a passionate kiss and in reality you’re just slobbering all over. I’m just waiting, though, for the first truly negative review of a Rainbow Rowell book on here. I saw a scathing review of Landline on tumblr and was thoroughly shocked by that. Like you put it, “I can’t even.”
Anyway, I totally get what you mean when you say it might’ve destroyed you if you’d read it at a different time. That’s what I was trying to get at towards the tail end of my review, but the best I could do was hint at it without spoiling things. (SPOILER ALERT) Like Georgie, I alternated between wanting desperately for them to hold on and coming just shy of outright saying they should break things off. It’s the reason I gave so much attention to that one quote, going so far as to make part of it the title for this post. All she can do, in the end, is promise him she’ll try. That’s the most any of us can do in a relationship. Except, the thing is, how’re you to know when it’s worth trying?
“[S]he’s been given an opportunity to fix her marriage before it starts . . .
Is that what she’s supposed to do?
Or would Georgie and Neal be better off if their marriage never happened?”
With that question being posed in the plot synopsis, you’d expect an answer, but Rowell admits there is no definitive answer to such a question because, really, there isn’t. And that’s probably what I love most about Landline, that she acknowledges that. (END SPOILER ALERT)
There are a lot more quotes I highlighted, too. Just didn’t want my review to be all quotes. Here are the biggest stand-outs I left unmentioned:
“Neal’s face could fly the Enola Gay.”
“If Georgie didn’t talk to her kids all day, it was easier to pretend their whole world froze in place while she was at work. She called them every day. Usually twice.”
“‘You think my dreams are a waste of time?’ ‘I think your dreams would be a waste of my time,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be happy.'” (An important distinction I need to start making in similar situations)
“She’d get out of the shower the next morning, and it would be written in the steam on the mirror. Dance. Dress. Try a little tenderness.”
“Georgie hadn’t known back then how much she was going to need Neal, how he was going to become like air to her. Was that codependence? Or was it just marriage?”
“She hoped this was the right Neal. (She didn’t mean the right Neal, she meant the young one.)”
“You don’t know when you’re twenty three. You don’t know what it really means to crawl into someone else’s life and stay there. You can’t see all the ways you’re going to get tangled, how you’re going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating will feel in five years, in ten–in fifteen. When George thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems.”
“He couldn’t keep his hands off her–he couldn’t keep his ink off her; he was always doodling on her stomach or her thigh or her shoulder. He kept a set of Prismacolor markers by his bed, and when Georgie took a shower, the water ran rainbows.”
“(Even if your heart is broken and attacking you, you’re still not better off without it.)”
“That’s what love is. Accidental damage protection.”
“The noise the phone makes when you leave it off the hook? It stops after a while.”
“Because he didn’t laugh when he thought something was funny–he laughed when he was happy.”