Landline

Landline - Rainbow Rowell 

DESCRIPTION

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?

REVIEW

I'm definitely in love with Rainbow Rowell, she's one of my favourite authors.

Every time I start one of her books I think that maybe I've already read her best, but every time I found that I'm wrong. 

Her books are all different but all absolutely lovely, emotionally and realistic.

She can write everything, she's always smart, funny, heartbreaking and enjoyable. 

Her stories drag you from the very first page and you can't help but fall into them literally.

Her characters are real, imperfect, but never dull. You can laugh with them, cry with them and at the end, you fall in love with them. 

Rainbow Rowell knows well how to write about love, I mean, real love. And she knows how to put magic in her writing.

You don't know when you're twenty-three.

You don't know what it really means to crawl into someone else's life and stay there. You can't see all the ways you're going to get tangled, how you're going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating will feel in five years, in ten - in fifteen.

She didn't know it at twenty-three.

I have not enough words to describe how I feel after this reading. I feel very close to this story, maybe because I'm married for almost ten years now, and I know well the feeling to waste your time, to forget simply gestures that maybe one day were important, but that now you can't see, you are not able to appreciate the same things with the same intensity and love. 

Love isn't easy, life isn't easy and relationships are a compromise every day, you can't avoid this, but sometimes you lose yourself, you lose the right way and you begin to forget about how to live with someone who you think to know well, who you think can be always there for you, but that one day can simply give up.

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

This is what happen to the main characters, Georgie and Neal, married for fifteen years, with to little children. They live in a precarious balance. Love is there but they can't see it, they can't catch it, taken away by job (her), house living  (him), the misunderstandings, the unspoken, the apathy, just as it can  happens to any couple, because Rowell's characters are all so real and you can't help but identify in them, in their characteristics, their facets.

They lose themselves, lose sight of love, their good habits, the complicity, the understanding. They  lose themselves and they believe can no longer reconnect each other, but as often happens in the Rowell's novel, it comes that touch of magic that makes you open your eyes, that makes you look in the mirror and realize that you are all wrong and you have to go back immediately.

How could she ever doubt that he loved her? When loving her was what he did better than all the things he did beautifully.

Georgie is tired and apathetic, a slave to a job that does not give the same satisfaction even more but could not say no. And Neil is so damn perfect in his disarming normality, so awesome man, husband, father, so imperfect yet so lovely.

I love you more than I hate everything else.

Neil's character has inspired me so much tenderness and empathy, I could not help but have a little crush on him. And I completely understand why Georgie was in love with him.

I think I can live without you... but it won't be any kind of life.

All the characters here are important and necessary: Georgie's mother, her best friend Seth, her sister, her little girls, Neil's father passed away. A truly different team that makes the story familiar and liveable.

I fall in the story, I fall in their life; I hoped, I held my breath and I cried.

An amazing novel, tender, true, touching and also funny, because Rowell's writing is so smart that leaves nothing else to do but to love her badly.

Neal didn’t take Georgie’s breath away. Maybe the opposite. But that was okay—that was really good, actually, to be near someone who filled your lungs with air.

I really loved every single words, every mistake, every beat. This is a story of life, love and second chance. An adult book that anyone can read. 

It wasn't just that she let him down, and put him off, and continually left him waiting--It was that she'd tied him to her so tight. Because she wanted him. Because he was perfect for Georgie, even if she wasn't perfect for him. Because she wanted him more than she wanted him to be happy.

I really want to give more than 5 stars because if there are some books that deserve maybe a pair of stars more, are Rainbow Rowell's novels.