The True Love Experiment
Author: Christina Lauren
Publisher: Gallery Books
Date of Publication: May 2023
Felicity “Fizzy” Chen, bestselling romance novelist, is lost. She’s hit a roadblock in her career and in her life: she can’t practice what she preaches. Fizzy hasn’t ever really been in love. Lust? Definitely. But that all-encompassing feeling? Nope. What happens when the optimism she’s spent her career encouraging in readers starts to feel like a lie?
Connor Prince, documentary filmmaker and divorced father, is driven to save the marine world one adorable seal video at a time. But when his profit-minded boss orders him to create a reality TV show—or else lose his job—Connor is out of his element. Desperate to find his romantic lead, a chance run-in with Fizzy offers Connor the perfect solution. What if he could show the queen of romance herself falling head-over-heels for all the world to see? When production on The True Love Experiment begins, Connor wonders if that perfect match will ever be in the cue cards for him, too.
Fizzy and her crises are exciting because she’s a sparking telephone pole in a Midwest thunderstorm—disaster waiting to happen. Each of the characters has a few defining traits that create both the drive and the frustration of the story. There’s Fizzy: spirited, sassy, sexual. There’s Connor: calm, tall, trying to be kind and controlled while his career takes a nosedive. There are a couple voices of reason and curiosity—Fizzy’s best friend Jess, and Jess and Connor’s respective daughters. None are particularly developed beyond their functions as sources of sympathy and interrogation, but without them Fizzy and Connor would collapse. Fizzy and Connor have enough flaws and desires to make them both charming and frustrating. They are characters that you want to succeed, just maybe after a couple of hurdles. Fizzy is almost unlikeable at first. Her public persona, flirty and confident, is offset by deep insecurities about her own romantic capabilities that aren’t exactly alleviated by her continued lustful pursuits. What keeps the reader’s attention beyond her quips and feistiness is her tentative, fearful discovery in her late thirties of what it means to love and be loved by someone. She is deeply set in her patterns and habits, and breaking them takes effort and willpower.
The reward of the story and of Fizzy’s complications is the forbidden and explosive— romance between coworkers that becomes irresistible as Fizzy and Connor’s resistance to one other collapse. The honeymoon period and the hard work of the relationship are left to be imagined after the last page, but at some point before that end, Connor and Fizzy’s relationship goes from being impossible and improper to being a necessity for them both, transitioning from the appeal of the forbidden to something more wholesome and full of positive potential. This book is fun and fast-paced, and curious about how hard it is for a person to change their romantic habits. Don’t expect a complex plot or people, but that lack does not diminish the energy and appeal.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Review of Station Eleven
Station Eleven
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Publisher: Knopf
Date of Publication: August 2014
Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night famous Hollywood actor Arthur Leander had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. The same night, a devastating flu pandemic arrived in Toronto and, within weeks, civilization came to an end. Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of a shattered world with The Traveling Symphony, a small troupe of actors and musicians keeping remnants of art and humanity alive. But when The Symphony arrives in the town of St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a “prophet” who will threaten the band’s existence. As the story moves through time, place, and civilization, it explores the connections that bind the pre-pandemic world to society as it now exists.
Dystopia is a tainted word. It conjures images of a gray and dying world, either hyper industrial or utterly bereft, where humans reduce to savagery and hope is the most scarce commodity. Kirsten’s dystopia is frequently defined by destruction. The Symphony wears clothes scrounged from houses of the dead—which is most people after the flu —and keeps scouts on watch as members sleep in the pitch-black night. Strange, stubborn perseverance maintains Kirsten’s humanity and sanity. Her connection to Arthur is tenuous at best; she was a child actress without a speaking role in the play where he died. Yet she remains obsessed with the paper trail of gossip and spectacle that followed him, pieces of the old world that certainly are not its most significant relics, but are just as certainly irreproducible post-pandemic. The connection to Arthur, quavering as a worn-out violin string, lets Mandel parallel stories of the old world and the new. The constants of humanity, regardless of how refined or collapsed civilization may be, are selfishness and curiosity, an effort to balance survivalist need with frivolous want, both material and emotional.
The world of Station Eleven is a dystopia that relies on the destruction and loss of current civilization, with our offering any utopia, past or present, yet also without denying either beauty or hope. This is also, at times quietly and at times unsubtly, a climate novel. This is a picture of the inevitable rebellion of an overcrowded planet, when the number and scale of our wants threaten our basic needs. The threads of fate do not entirely wind together by the end, nor does the story complete itself; neither could occur when the next global pandemic and constant draining of the planet’s resources are real and looming. There is a sense that some malevolent intention or willful negligence must have been responsible for releasing the disease or failing to close the airports in time. At a certain point, though, present exigencies eclipse the precipitating events. The story does not focus on the big picture of social collapse and its causes. It focuses on individuals, flawed and loving and selfish and struggling. Individual strivings, wants, and needs are what drive the world, no matter how broken. Even if the particular catastrophes of the past may not repeat themselves, human wants and needs and feelings persist and repeat. Left to hang in the present is the question of whether the best or worst of humanity will prevail, and what points of connection will draw people together.
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Publisher: Knopf
Date of Publication: August 2014
Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night famous Hollywood actor Arthur Leander had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. The same night, a devastating flu pandemic arrived in Toronto and, within weeks, civilization came to an end. Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of a shattered world with The Traveling Symphony, a small troupe of actors and musicians keeping remnants of art and humanity alive. But when The Symphony arrives in the town of St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a “prophet” who will threaten the band’s existence. As the story moves through time, place, and civilization, it explores the connections that bind the pre-pandemic world to society as it now exists.
Dystopia is a tainted word. It conjures images of a gray and dying world, either hyper industrial or utterly bereft, where humans reduce to savagery and hope is the most scarce commodity. Kirsten’s dystopia is frequently defined by destruction. The Symphony wears clothes scrounged from houses of the dead—which is most people after the flu —and keeps scouts on watch as members sleep in the pitch-black night. Strange, stubborn perseverance maintains Kirsten’s humanity and sanity. Her connection to Arthur is tenuous at best; she was a child actress without a speaking role in the play where he died. Yet she remains obsessed with the paper trail of gossip and spectacle that followed him, pieces of the old world that certainly are not its most significant relics, but are just as certainly irreproducible post-pandemic. The connection to Arthur, quavering as a worn-out violin string, lets Mandel parallel stories of the old world and the new. The constants of humanity, regardless of how refined or collapsed civilization may be, are selfishness and curiosity, an effort to balance survivalist need with frivolous want, both material and emotional.
The world of Station Eleven is a dystopia that relies on the destruction and loss of current civilization, with our offering any utopia, past or present, yet also without denying either beauty or hope. This is also, at times quietly and at times unsubtly, a climate novel. This is a picture of the inevitable rebellion of an overcrowded planet, when the number and scale of our wants threaten our basic needs. The threads of fate do not entirely wind together by the end, nor does the story complete itself; neither could occur when the next global pandemic and constant draining of the planet’s resources are real and looming. There is a sense that some malevolent intention or willful negligence must have been responsible for releasing the disease or failing to close the airports in time. At a certain point, though, present exigencies eclipse the precipitating events. The story does not focus on the big picture of social collapse and its causes. It focuses on individuals, flawed and loving and selfish and struggling. Individual strivings, wants, and needs are what drive the world, no matter how broken. Even if the particular catastrophes of the past may not repeat themselves, human wants and needs and feelings persist and repeat. Left to hang in the present is the question of whether the best or worst of humanity will prevail, and what points of connection will draw people together.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)