Landline

4.5 Stars

If the last few years have taught us readers anything, it's that if you want quirky, honest, heart-felt romance with real (and usually moderately overweight) people and solid laughs, Rainbow Rowell will consistently deliver for you. And if you don't think you want that, after you read her, you'll realize that's just what you wanted after all. She has two YA books and now two Adult books to her credit. Her latest, Landline delivers the typical Rowell magic in her story, but this time she included something else: actual magic. Sort of.

Georgie McCool is half of a pretty successful TV writing team who are thiiiiis close to being much more successful, all they have to do is crank out a handful of scripts in the next couple of weeks and they're in a great position to sell their first series. The catch is, this involves working over Christmas – despite Georgie's plans to go to her mother-in-law's in Omaha with her husband, Neal and their two daughters. Georgie says that she can't pass up this opportunity, so Neal and the girls go off without her.

Georgie sees this as a regrettable occurrence, but one of the sacrifices she has to make to get her dream show made. Her mother, step-father and sister see it as her husband leaving her, and Georgie ends up staying with them. Which gets Georgie to worrying – especially when she can never seem to reach Neal on the phone during the day. At night, however, when her iPhone battery is dead, she has to resort to the landline in her old room and she ends up talking to Neal back before they got engaged.

Don't ask. It makes no sense. She never bothers to explain. And it doesn't matter. Georgie eventually figures out that's what's going on and she rolls with it, and the reader does, too.

These conversations, as well as the absence of her family, lead Georgie on a path down memory lane, reflecting on the beginning of their relationship and how it changed as they did. Maybe Neal had made a mistake choosing her. Maybe she'd ruined her life (and his) by choosing him. Would they have both been better off going their separate ways? Or was there something worth fighting for now? Would that matter? The clock is ticking – for Georgie's marriage (both now and then) and her career. Is she up for it?

The tension is real, the apprehension, fear, and self-doubt (for starters) that Georgie is wrestling with is very obvious and palpable. Yet while focusing on this, Rowell's able to create a believable world filled with a lot of interesting people. There's Georgie's partner/best friend, Seth and another writer on their current (and hopefully future) show – and Georgie failing to hold up her end of things there, as much as she tries.

Then there's her sister, mother and step-father. They're much better developed (probably only because we spend more time with them). Her mother's a pretty implausible character, yet not a cartoon, she's a pug fanatic, married someone much younger than her, and generally seems really happy. Her sister's about done with high school and is figuring herself out (and mostly has) – she's a hoot, and my biggest problem with the book is that we don't get more of Heather. Not that there wasn't plenty of her – and it'd require the book to take a far different shape. We get whole storylines about all the non-Neal people in her life, little vignettes showing us their character, giving us smiles in the midst of Georgie's crisis, like:

“Kids are perceptive, Georgie. They're like dogs”–she offered a meatball from her own fork to the pug heaped in her lap–“they know when their people are unhappy.”
“I think you may have just reverse-anthropomorphized your own grandchildren.”
Her mom waved her empty fork dismissively. “You know what I mean.”
Heather leaned into Georgie and sighed. “Sometimes I feel like her daughter. And sometimes I feel like the dog with the least ribbons.”

Georgie hadn't known back then how much she was going to come to need Neal, how he was going to become like air to her.
Was that codependence? Or was it just marriage?”

She needed him.
Neal was home. Neal was base.
Neal was where Georgie plugged in, and synced up, and started fresh every day. He was the only one who knew her exactly as she was.

Landline

“Nobody's lives just fit together. Fitting together is something you work at. It's something you make happen - because you love each other.”

Her grand gesture didn't impress me as I don't think it solved anything in the end. Her epiphanies will amount to nothing if she doesn't confront her husband about his unhappiness. After all, it was 1998 Neal she was talking to throughout that week, not the current version of him. This Neal still doesn't know what's going in her head. Seth is still a very real and serious problem between them and she still hasn't made a decision in regards to that. They have been each other's crutches for almost twenty years but it has to stop. She needs to draw some boundaries or they will be in the same spot as the week before.

I guess I just wanted to see her and present Neal really open up to each other and talk about how they were actively going to work on improving their marriage. Just her showing up there couldn't possibly be enough for him. Neither "I'll do better".

What I love about Rainbow Rowell's writing, whether she's writing adult or YA fiction, is how unadorned and engaging it is. She makes writing and storytelling look effortless, and her dialogue is fresh and real. Landline is the first of Rowell's adult fiction I've read, and I loved it. I love the mystery of the magic phone, and the layers it adds to the dynamic and development of the relationship and the main character. It's a way for us to be able to look back at how the relationship developed and how it got here; it's also a way for the main character to engage with the past and evolve. Its magic is never explained, which I'm okay with.

The other thing I adore about Rainbow Rowell is that she gets relationships. She captures the thrill and breathlessness and joy of teenage loves, first loves, and the beginnings of relationships. With Landline, she also captures the quiet fire that is a long-term relationship, and how that fire either gets maintained or smothered to embers. Her characters aren't always the most likeable (whatever that means), but they're complex and messy and trying to figure shit out – just like real people. I've read Eleanor and Park, Fangirl, and Landline, and I've seen myself in each of those books. That feels really difficult to do.

I finished Landline while flying across the country with a terrible cold. Maybe it was exhaustion, but the last third of Landline kept punching me in the heart and I finally broke out into an ugly-cry on the plane. I tried to hide it, because I was sitting close to the bathroom and people were constantly walking past my seat or standing in line next to my seat, but I finally thought, “Oh, fuck it. This book deserves an ugly cry at 10,000 feet.”

I love love Rainbow Rowell. She is one of the best writers I've ever read, easily in my top favorites list. This book is the best I've read from her so far. I love how life doesn't end after marriage in Rowell's world (like it so often does in other stories). The story begins with a marriage. The characters are so compelling and this book gave me all the emotions. As always with her books, everyone felt real and believable. I really and truly loved this novel. Just every single thing about it.

Terminei o livro em um dia, mas como estava sem Internet, não pude atualizar ontem. É interessante, e bem o estilo de escrita de Rainbow Rowell, e o final que perturba, pois não tem o final que esperamos acaba do nada. Achei o começo muito difícil de engatar na história, me envolver com as personagens, e desenvolvi raiva por alguns deles (Seth principalmente, embora em alguns momentos o achei uma versão chata do Levi de Fangirl), como a própria Georgie, por ser muito a culpada e não perceber.
Estava esperando muito um novo Anexos ou Fangirl nesse texto e não correspondeu as expectativas.
O que gostei bastante foram algumas reflexões sobre o amor expostas por eles e que mostram a possibilidade de falarmos de amor e sentimentos de forma clara.

O que mais? As conversas entre eles, por mais que parecesse que havíamos grampeado o telefone deles, foi o que valeu o livro ... Acredito ser só isso no momento :)

I. Loved. This.

Oh, my gosh. Loved loved loved it. It was so REAL and the emotion was wonderful. I can see how it would be boring if you don't like reading about relationships but I absolutely loved it. The characters are seriously the people in my life so maybe that is why I liked it even more but 100%, solid book.

Abandoned at 20%.

Seems like it has some good comments on love and relationships–loving is hard work, but commitment is important; you should be with someone that can't help but love you and they love you in the right way; etc. Not really wanting to read a book about relationships and marriages right now. Boring plot, seems to be similar to the movie, Frequency, where someone is able to speak with their loved one from the past to discover some hidden truth or work through something.
I enjoyed the writing. Seemed easy to read. Just not what I want right now.

Growing together really lies at the heart of what makes a long-term relationship work. In Rainbow Rowell's Landline, Georgie and Neal meet while working at their campus humor magazine in college, marry when they're 23, and by the time they're in their late 30s, they have what looks like on the outside to be a cozy little setup. Georgie writes for a cheesy sitcom, and Neal is a stay-at-home dad to their two little girls. But Georgie and her long-time writing partner have dreamed of their own show for ages, and they finally get the chance to pitch it to someone who could make it happen. In order to give it their best shot, though, Georgie will need to miss the annual family trip to Nebraska to spend Christmas with Neal's parents. Her decision to do so, combined with her husband's growing dissatisfaction, puts her marriage in jeopardy.

Desperate to get ahold of her husband and with a dying cellphone, she drags out an old landline phone to connect with him. Georgie slowly comes to realize, though, that while the voice on the other end of the line is her husband, it's not him now. It's him on Christmas break their senior year in college, when he broke up with her but then suddenly showed up on her doorstep with a ring. As she remembers the early days of their love story, and the versions of themselves they used to be, she finds herself thinking about how things have changed over the years and re-evaluating what it actually is that she wants and needs from her life.

Rainbow Rowell is a writer who is constantly recommended for her sweet, compelling love stories. This one will strike a chord for many women who work and feel stuck between their home/family life and their career. Although Georgie's probably the more relatable character simply because the story's told from her perspective, I really appreciated that both she and Neal are painted in shades of grey. She's not demonized for wanting to be successful in her chosen field, but neither is he for feeling neglected and put-upon. The characters Rowell builds feel real, and so do the situations she puts them in. And, crucial in a book about being on the phone, she's got a great knack for dialogue.

Now on to the less good. Landline was Rowell's first adult novel (most of her work falls into YA), and I'd heard it was not one of her stronger efforts. I'm glad I had that warning ahead of time, because while I thought there were a lot of flaws here I wasn't crushingly disappointed. In order to really buy into the book, you have to be emotionally invested in Georgie and Neal's love story, and I just wasn't. I didn't understand what brought them together in the first place, much less what kept them together. And the tone of the whole thing just felt wonky. On the one hand, Rowell clearly wanted to write something light-hearted and charming, with quirky side characters all over the place to keep the mood up (her mom breeds pugs AND has a much younger husband! And her younger daughter insists on being called Noomi instead of Naomi AND talks like a cat!). But on the other, she's trying to write something heartfelt about the challenges of making sure you and your spouse/partner are growing together and not apart, and the stresses of trying to keep your family happy and achieve your professional goals. That's a much more serious book, and in trying to toe the line between them it fails more often than it succeeds. But I liked the quality of her writing, and while I ultimately wasn't wow-ed by this book, I'm definitely interested in reading her YA.

nem volt elég rossz egy dnf-hez, de nem bántam volna, ha kimarad az életemből ez a könyv.
az írás persze remek, mint mindig, de a történet meg a szereplők meglehetősen borzasztóak voltak, élen a hapsival, akiért ez a szerencsétlen nő úgy odavolt. egyszerűen képtelen voltam átérezni bármit is ebből az egészből. nagyjából három kínai nagyfal meg egy vasfüggöny állt köztünk.

J'ai eu beaucoup de difficulté à apprécier ce livre, heureusement que je ne la lisais pas et que je l'écoutait plutôt en livre audio, car autrement je ne l'aurais jamais terminé! Je ne le recommanderais pas, car je n'ai pas l'impression que le livre ait donné quelque chose à l'histoire, on commence la lecture et les personnages sont comme ceci et on termine le livre et presque rien n'a changé. De plus les personnages n'étaient pas particulièrement attachants, surtout Georgie, les personnages les plus attachants étaient le couple qui a aidé Georgie à trouver la maison des parents de Neil! Autrement la plupart des autres personnages étaient prévisibles et moyennement intéressants... Je suis très déçue par cette lecture, pourtant j'avais beaucoup aimé Attachments, j'espère que Fangirl et Eleonor and Park sont bien meilleurs que celui-ci.

This is the fourth Rowell novel I've read and the fourth Rowell novel I've enjoyed. I've read enough Rowell to figure out the secret of her magic is twofold: great dialogue and great real characters. This story is about the marriage of Georgie and her husband, Neal. The marriage has hit a rock and we are not sure whether the boat is going down or if someone can patch the hole before it's too late. It doesn't take long to find yourself loving Georgie and Neal, rooting for them, wishing you could pull them aside and trying to help them along. And, oddly, though the reader can't help out, assistance does come in a totally unexpected form, from conversations on an old landline phone.

It was interesting reading this right after [b:Seconds 20442885 Seconds Bryan Lee O'Malley https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1399502819s/20442885.jpg 17378014], because they're both about late twentysomething/early thirtysomethings getting some kind of do-over. I loved them both, because I guess I'm at that stage of my life. EVERYTHING'S FINE DON'T LOOK AT MEI loved Georgie as a protagonist. Except for the failing marriage part, I related to her very strongly. The magic phone part was kind of... IDEK if it was necessary, to be honest, but also I don't care.

She did it once again. Poetic, but not cheesy, Landline is the first time Rainbow Rowell adventures herself into the adult couples in crisis universe, and brilliantly. At first i thought I knew what Was going to happen and was a bit disappointed, and as the story progressed I saw the error of my ways: even if it was predictable, she would have made it worthwhile.
Georgie is a series writer on the verge of a career break - and a break up from her 15 year husband as a consequence.
Everything else is a lovely and sweet and real and poweful - with the right amount of crazy, represented by a yellow phone that transports her to a past when she was led by certainties more often than not.
If you are still waiting, I haven't done a good job, so I'll sum it up: she rocks, as usual.

It has a main character named Georgie McCool–how cool is that?

It has time travel, of sorts, for those of us intrigued by science fictional tropes, but it isn't technical wizardry science fiction that would ruin the mood for others.

It has pugs, two of them, Porky and Petunia. It has pug puppies, newborns nestled in the clothes dryer.

It has a rom-com ending that isn't sickly sweet, but perfect, with enough ambiguity to make one consider life carefully.

It is thoughtful and funny and marvelous and you read it word by word careful not to miss anything and you are sad when it ends, but only because it ends, not because of the way it ends.

It's a nearly perfect book. It is a perfect book, except for the “discussion questions” at the end. Don't read the fucking discussion questions!

Re-read this on Christmas Eve Eve and Christmas Eve 2016. Bumping it up from three to four stars. It's a cozy, heartwarming read for this time of year.

—

This was fun to listen to and there were some really good bits. But the plot was so one-note, like it should have been a short story. But what do I know – I listened to this mostly while I was sick and probably even slept through parts of it (oops).