Book Smart Kate

Book: 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Spice: 🌶️

by Ashley Poston (June 25, 2024) – Many thanks to @berkleyromance for a gifted digital copy of this wildly entertaining book that is both a romance and a love letter to romance novels.

Eileen Meriweather and her friends do an annual romance book reading getaway, but she is going alone this year. Bummed that all of her friends bailed, she is making the long drive alone, but when her car breaks down, she finds herself in a town that feels both odd and oddly familiar because it is Eloraton, the quirky small town that exists in her favorite romance novel series. The series was left unfinished when the author passed away, and the town is also unfinished, frozen in the author’s unfinished manuscript. While waiting for her car to be fixed, she does what any fan would do – visit all the places and talk to all the characters she loved in the stories. But there is one character she can’t place, Anderson, the handsome & grumpy bookstore owner, who seems to be the only character that knows they are in a story, and he doesn’t want Eileen messing with the plot. The longer she spends in the town, puzzling out the people, the bookstore owner, and the mysteries of the plot, the less she wants to leave.

Like in The Dead Romantics and The Seven Year Slip, our main character has a magical intervention that helps her find love and discover something important about herself. It took me a little time to connect with the story because many of the characters aren’t developed in the same way they would have been if you were reading the series in which the magical town exists. You are dropped into a town Eileen is already familiar with from reading the series, and we are told the characters’ backstory rather than experiencing it – because they aren’t the story; Eileen is. Once I readjusted my thinking, I enjoyed the book and related to the desire to experience the worlds that incredible authors create. I loved Eileen and Anders’s journeys, the meta-like storytelling of writing a romance novel about being inside a romance novel, and the idea of what happens after the happily ever after. Overall, it was an incredibly thoughtful book!

If you could live inside a book, what book would you choose?