Laura Stone (1)

This is a nice, slow-build, second-chance-at-love novel. Oliver and Seth were childhood sweethearts who broke up when they were undergrads. Now it's six years later, Oliver is a grad student in England and Seth is an up-and-coming star on Broadway and they've got to figure out if they should try to make things work between them again. Stone does a good job at making the relationship development feel organically two steps forward, one step back, and surrounding the leads with a cast of nicely sketched supporting characters.

There were, however, a couple of relatively minor things which prevented me from enjoying the novel fully. The first is that Oliver is trying to decide between the British and American doctoral systems, neither of which was described quite accurately (a PhD in the British system, for instance, doesn't take six years to complete). The second was Moira, Oliver's Sassy Irish Friend. It wasn't that Moira's dialogue was made up of words and phrases that Irish people wouldn't say—it's that it was made up of several different Irish dialects (and some Scottish words—Irish people don't say that we "ken" something, unless maybe in Ulster Scots? But she was pretty clearly supposed to be a Catholic from the Republic) and Moira at once sounded like a 20-something and like my grandmother. It'd be like having an American character show up and say, "Howdy, I'm fixing to go get me a hoagie and pop before I get on line to go lindyhopping with this groovy dame here in my home town of Los Angeles", or an English character say, "What ho, chaps, I'm a Scouser from down t'mill innit?" It jarred me out of the novel every time she spoke and it's all the more frustrating because it's the kind of thing that's relatively easy to fix.… (more)