This may be a 3.5 star book, but I’m not actually sure right now.
Thank you to William Morrow and NetGalley for this ARC. My opinions are my own. This book is out on April 14th.
Cherry’s husband, Tom, is in Los Angeles, working on turning his web comic-turned extremely successful graphic novel, Thursday, into a movie. His semi-autobiographical comic, which happens to have a caricatured version of Cherry in it, who is called Baby. Now that there are multiple trailers, even complete strangers recognise Cherry in all sorts of strange places. She is trying very hard not to pay any attention to all the publicity.
Very few people know that Tom has been away for the last year, and that Cherry asked him for a divorce. The rest of Cherry’s family is all very religious and keeps telling her to forgive him and take him back. However, Cherry is bitter. Tom’s off living the high life in Hollywood, while she’s at home, in the house they bought together to possibly build a family in, taking care of the gigantic dog that Tom wanted and left Cherry with. One evening, when Cherry is out at a concert, she reconnects with an old friend from college, whom she had always had a crush on but never acted on, because he dated her best friend. Russ Sutton is still very handsome and seems utterly delighted to see Cherry again. While she was pretty solidly friend-zoned back in college, he now seems absolutely crazy about her. He also appears to never even have heard of Thursday.
But suddenly, Tom is back from Los Angeles, ready to pack up his things and make the move permanent. Deciding how to split the contents of the house turns into a long, drawn-out process (after more than a decade together), and Cherry starts realising that she might not be ready to give up on her marriage, after all.
I was so incredibly excited when I was granted an ARC for this novel. Rainbow Rowell is one of my favourite authors. So many of her books have elements that feel like they were written for me, specifically – especially Attachments, Fangirl and Landline. I bought Slow Dance in hardback when I was in Vermont visiting my best friend last year, so I could read it on release day. So it’s really difficult for me to write this review, because this is the first book of Rowell’s where I’m not actually sure what I think, and how I should rate it. I read it in two days (because I thought it was coming out on April 7th, and I like to try to get my ARC reviews done around the release date of the book – turns out I was a week early) and I feel really conflicted, because while there were things I liked about it, there were also a lot of things that I disliked and/or that made me deeply uncomfortable.
Full review on my blog.
