This month, I have decided to ignore the usual order, and I am backtracking to July’s theme of SuperWendy’s TBR challenge and I am going to post on the theme of What a Wonderful World. I will find a way to catch up on August and September at another time.

July – What a Wonderful World

Reading Note 78: In July, I found myself reading Kate Clayborn’s The Other Side of Disappearing. This novel is not the focal point of this TBR post but I will discuss it in short.

I am a big fan of Kate Clayborn with several Shallowreader posts proselytising about her books and I waited several months on the library holds list before getting access to this novel. It is a story about two age-gap half-sisters whose shitty mum has abandoned them. Jess has been caring for Tegan for many years, and now that Tegan has come of age, she wants to seek out her mother who ran off with a con-man. With the awkward involvement of two journalists, Adam and (secondary but important character) Salem. The four of them go on a road-trip, following the trail of the few postcards sent by shitty mum. The road-trip allows for the slow reveal of the characters motivations, soul-searching and psyches, as well as their relationships with each other. And of course, it builds up to Jess and Adam’s romance.

I was expecting a wonderful story, however, unlike most of my romance blogger friends, I was left unmoved by the novel. It was an OK story, I could see the complexity of the numerous characters development and their story arcs but it didn’t give me the joy that Claybourn’s other books have given me. If anything, it left me frustrated, as the storytelling felt disjointed which I will attribute to the function of the “he said/she said” structure where each chapter alternated the point-of-view of each protagonist, both of which were told in the first point-of-view and in a mostly linear trajectory.

I personally love two point-of-view/head-jumping romances where you get an insight into each character’s thoughts. The last decade (and more) trend towards a first point-of-view and only from one of the main characters, annoyed me immensely. It was like romance fiction had reverted to the 1970s and 1980s when this was the standard. I loved the 1990s which shifted the storytelling to allow for multiple characters’ perceptions of the relationship build. I am glad that we are now seeing a return to two (or more) perspectives, however it is like a pendulum. The he said/she said style of alternating chapters are jarring to read as they move from one character to the other.

This year, having read a number of novels in a row with this he said/she said structure, I needed to be quite deliberate in seeking out a book that was written differently. On that had numerous points-of-view, head jumping through the story and told in the third person. I chose to go to Sarah Morgan’s Puffin Island series which has been on my TBR since 2015. Morgan’s Some Kind of Wonderful is Book 2 in the Puffin Island series whose prelude book 0.5 is a Harlequin category romance, and one of my all time favourite novels Playing By The Greek’s Rules.

Reading Note 79:

Before I discuss Some Kind of Wonderful by Sarah Morgan, here is the blurb.

Blurb: Her whole life, Puffin Islander Brittany Forrest has dreamed of adventure. And at the age of eighteen, she thought she’d found it in bad boy Zachary Flynn. But after just ten tempestuous, smoldering days, their whirlwind marriage went up in smoke, and Brittany resolved to put him out of her mind forever.

Zach knows he let Brittany down, but being back on Puffin Island and seeing Brittany again stirs up long-buried emotions. This daredevil pilot has never felt worthy of her, yet he can’t stay away—even when he knows the chemistry between them will only complicate his life.

As long, hot summer days on the beach dissolve into sultry, starry nights, Brittany and Zach find that the sparks between them are more powerful than ever. Could it be that the second time around, their dreams of a happy-ever-after will finally come true?

Some Kind of Wonderful is a second chance at love trope with the protagonists having been married for 10 tempestuous days when they were 18 and 22 years old. Groom and bad boy Zach, disappears from sweet Brittany’s life, only to reappear as her pilot in a small plane flight back to Puffin Island, a whole 10 years later. I guess in our current culture, a 22 year old and an 18 year old falling in love/lust/sex tips on the boundary of problematic. I wasn’t unbothered by it, as it was only 4 years difference and it suited the narrative as the backstory of both of the characters.

Of course, there is a lot of tension between the two of them as they keep running into each other on the small island community. They slowly realise that they still like each other, and they are still attracted to each other but their past is very difficult to overcome. The two come to a realisation about their own complicitness as well as their own immaturity when they first married. This older version of a 32 year old with a 28 year old is so much more grounded and robust as a relationship. It showed consideration, maturity, friendship and deep understanding of their intimate needs and how they compliment but also differ from their sexual needs. 

Brittany has a moment of realisation that her younger 18 year old self who was so obsessed with Zach. She wasn’t mature enough to deal with the complexities of this emotionally damaged young man, and he was battling some dark demons despite his love for her. She had asked him to marry and he went along with it. He thought she pitied him and didn’t realise that she did see the good part of his character:

It isn’t until these 10 years later that Zach is forthcoming about his troubled childhood, with Brittany reflecting “How could she have been so selfish and unthinking?”[….]“She treated him like a goal, something that could be obtained if she worked hard enough, like an A grade in English. And when her marriage had failed, she’d limped away, blaming him, whereas in actual fact, the blame lay firmly in her lap.” Brittany at one point thinks:

“Context. It was a word she’d used on an almost daily basis over the past few years. Context was essential to building a picture, for establishing a relationship between things. For finding and making connections. Discovering more about a person wasn’t so different. You uncovered the past. You made connections and looked for context”.  

In Zach ❤️ Brittany version. 1 neither of them had much context and they were way too young to know how important it was. Zach did a good thing (but in a bad way) by walking out. These two should never had married so young. Thankfully, they each spent 10 years living good lives, gaining experience, not pining and having strong relationships with others. I loved this for both of them. It made them a better Zach ❤️ Brittany version. 2. There is even a moment when Zach repents and realises that Brittany “truly loved him, and he’d thrown that away” but I was all “Dude! there is not much you could have done to salvage yourselves. You were both just babies still”!

Overall, this was a lovely story that I will probably return to reread at some time. Sarah Morgan has that affect on me with her romance writing. I haven’t yet ventured into reading her women’s fiction as I fear what it will be missing. I am not a fan of second-chance relationships but I am a fan of this one. I guess the moral to this story is that marrying young on the basis of obsession and good sex is not a good idea. Even if you like each other a lot (let alone all the angsty demons stuff).

Ultimately, I chose to read Sarah Morgan because I needed to find myself a novel that head jumped from the female to the male protaganists internal thoughts in a seamless way, never throwing me out of the reading experience. This novel was successful in giving me that reading experience. The story is framed by the progression in the plot rather than the necessity to frame the other person’t POV of the same plot point. It annoys me that after a dearth of enjoyable romance novels, that even though I have finally found a few books that I loved, this niggling writing point had me turning to much to books published many years earlier to reach the emotional high that I seek out from romance fiction. I suspect that the majority of romance fiction is now written as a play script, with hopes to sell for movie rights. These often lack the strong emotional internal reckoning which novels are more able to explore. A key reason why I read much more than I watch.