I stumbled through the online stores and saw
Abby Jimenez, and a cursory examination of her backstory engaged me. Her purported genre,
romance, turns me off, but I applaud both her word skills, and promotions. There’s that level of authenticity that seeps from her works. I can’t find it now, but I know I recently read one of her shorter pieces, not a full novel, turned out to be a bit of bodice ripper, still, I enjoyed it. The language, the pacing, the description, certainly a novelist’s eye. Still, she was billed as “romance.”
The most recent novel is
Say You’ll Remember Me, advertised as a “literary rom-com.” I can use some “happily ever after,” and I know that I have to approach anything new with an open mind. I got a library copy, started reading, and suddenly I was a third of the way through, unable to put it down. Tropes, sure, all the correct elements, almost like a it was from a pre-formatted outline, just fill in the blanks with “meet cute,” but early on, some of the adorning filler material was timely and topical.
Hint: there’s a trigger warning at the beginning. Read that before starting the book.
The yearning, the obstacles, the younger voice of the protagonist, and then? Her hero? There’s a very archetypical format the plot follows, almost straight from
The Hero’s Journey: the hero with a thousand faces.
I wasn’t thinking about that, though, when I was compulsively reading the last 100 pages.
“Someone who loves animals, but only tolerates most people?”
Know anyone like that? I do. I’ve found that dogs always tend to be good judges of character.
Perfect contemporary literature that surely transcends its taxonomy.
If only someone had tips about this?
