Landline by Rainbow Rowell

Release Date: July 8, 2014
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Age Group: Adult
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
Pages: 308
Buy: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound
Description: Goodreads
Georgie McCool knows her marriage is in trouble. That it’s been in trouble for a long time. She still loves her husband, Neal, and Neal still loves her, deeply — but that almost seems besides the point now.

Maybe that was always besides 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?

In her online bio, Rainbow Rowell states that sometimes she writes about teenagers and sometimes she writes about adults.  I found 2011’s Attachments to have a crossover appeal for a teenager looking to branch out or even a YA-reading adult looking to, well, also branch out.  I’ve been quite grabby-hands about Rainbow’s next adult book, this summer’s Landline, since the moment I knew it existed.  As I dove into Georgie’s story, as I rabidly and rapidly turned pages, I found myself wondering how an honest-to-blog teenager would relate to this.  This is not because I think teenagers aren’t complex people with deep-seated emotions and complicated hearts—they clearly are—but Landline is very much a grown-up romance. 

And that is the exact reason I loved it so.

Normally, I’m all about the swoon of YA—the butterflies from the first glances, the first kisses that take your breath away,  the description of that seemingly impassable inch between two hands before they beat the odds and reach one another.  I basically live for that.  And those moments do exist in Landline in Georgie’s flashbacks to college when she first meets Neal (Neal, Neal, Neal), the man who would become her husband.  They are typical Rainbow (what a beautiful phrase!) which means they are vivid and gorgeous and real and aching.  They are so much of all of those things that I kept gazing at my husband as I read, recalling our own college courtship and seeing the guy he was then within the man he is.  Needless to say, it freaked him out a little bit.

This is the exact thing I adore so much about Landline.  It’s not about first love; it’s about last love.  It’s about the one you choose, the love that evolves and matures into something you could have never expected at age 20.  It’s also about marriage—the good and the bad and the ugly—and whether that evolved love is enough.  Enough for what?  Well, that’s for you to find out.

Honestly, I could talk about this for hours and days and the only person who would listen to that is my husband and even then he’d be looking for a magic phone to talk to Past Jessica and ask her to kindly shut her yapper many years in the future, so I’ll move on.

What else do I love?  Georgie and Seth’s TV show.  If I ever become a sitcom writer, I may try to recreate that show because I WOULD WATCH THAT SO HARD my eyeballs would fall out.  Also, Georgie’s kids.   Hi Alice.  Meow, Noomi.  And my most favorite bit?  An Easter Egg for readers of Rainbow’s previous books near the end that I will not ruin for you but OMG. OMG. OH. MY. GOD.


So, let’s sum up: I love this book in a mature and evolved way, I feel every married person should read this, and I would follow Rainbow Rowell into the dark.