― Rainbow Rowell, Landline
Maybe that was always beside the point.
Two days before they’re supposed to visit Neal’s family in Omaha for Christmas, Georgie tells Neal that she can’t go. She’s a TV writer, and something’s come up on her show; she has to stay in Los Angeles. She knows that Neal will be upset with her — Neal is always a little upset with Georgie — but she doesn’t expect to him to pack up the kids and go home without her.
When her husband and the kids leave for the airport, Georgie wonders if she’s finally done it. If she’s ruined everything.
That night, Georgie discovers a way to communicate with Neal in the past. It’s not time travel, not exactly, but she feels like she’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?
2. Real characters. Georgie McCool (yea, that’s her name..) was not likable. She was flawed, she screwed up, and sometimes, I just wanted to slap some sense into her. Despite that, I found myself relating to her. Who doesn’t take their significant others for granted? Who doesn’t screw up from time to time? The whole novel, she struggled with defining what was important to her and figuring out what was best for her family. I liked seeing that process. Plus, Neal was pretty darn awesome, and I was cheering for them from the start.
3. A touch of magic. The biggest point of contention for me while reading this book was trying to figure out how this landline really fit into the novel. By the end of it, I saw the importance, but throughout the novel, I had trouble reconciling the “magic” of this phone with the very real lives of Georgie and Neal. I think that has more to do with my expectations going into the novel than it does with the novel itself, mostly because I was expecting a Rainbow Rowell book and she hasn’t had any fantastical happenings in any of the other novels I’ve read by her. By the end of it, though, I appreciated the magic of the landline.
She didn’t know at twenty-three.”
“Nobody’s lives just fit together. Fitting together is something you work at. It’s something you make happen – because you love each other.”
“The future was going to happen, even if he wasn’t ready for it. Even if he was never ready for it. At least he could make sure he was with the right person. Wasn’t that the point of life? To find someone to share it with? And if you got that part right, how far wrong could you go? If you were standing next to the person you loved more than everything else, wasn’t everything else just scenery?”
