I would read Anita Kelly’s grocery list. I loved How You Get the Girl. It’s just…perfect.
Julie Parker is coaching a girls high school basketball team, which is fun and rewarding, but she feels adrift and left behind everywhere else in her life. Her twin sibling, London, from Love & Other Disasters, is in a committed relationship and is doing work they love. Her best friend, Ben, from Something Wild & Wonderful, is getting ready to move from Nashville to the Pacific Northwest to live with his love, Alexie. Elle Cochran’s orderly life has just been thrown into chaos when her cousin’s teen daughter, Vanessa, is placed with her by Child Protective Services. Vanessa, under protest, joins the basketball team a couple of weeks into practice. Elle was a professional basketball player and a star of the Lady Volunteers, University of Tennessee’s storied team. Julie had a huge crush on Elle as a teen, and Julie didn’t have many crushes.
On the road to their happy ending, Julie asks Elle to be her assistant coach and Elle offers to “practice date” Julie who feels like she doesn’t know how to start a relationship. Though they are so clearly attracted to each other that the girls on the team are rooting for them to get together, their transition from friendship to romantic relationship is fraught with complications. One complication is Elle’s chronic depression. A big thing happens and Elle doesn’t tell Julie about it because she feels unable/unworthy to communicate. This was so familiar to me. As my chronic depression ebbs and flows, there are times when I can’t do words and it is a frequent source of frustration for the people around me. (The can’t do words aspect of my currently waning season depression is why I am finishing this review two weeks after I started it).
There are some suggested Book Club discussion questions in the back of the book. One of them pinpointed an aspect of contemporary romance I’ve been thinking about recently.
But I think one of the big reasons I wanted to write a story like this is because I believe falling in love while in the midst of struggling with complicated daily life—family trauma, unexpected events, hating your job (or alternately, being too committed to your job), feeling unsure about yourself in this big confusing world—that’s just as romantic as falling in love while spending months hiking over mountains or being in a bubble of a TV set. In real life, we are often just striving for that HFN [Happy For Now] however we can. And when we find it on top of everything else? Perhaps that’s the most romantic thing of all.
Anita Kelly’s thoughtfulness and gentleness as a writer continues to delight me.
CW: child removed from parent’s custody for neglect, parent of foster child in rehab, navigating complicated family during holidays, pet illness (survived), career ending injury in past, struggles with depression, struggles with labeling sexuality, migraines.
I received this as an advance reader copy from Forever and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.
