Love Lettering

"This is an Earphones Award winner from us. I started listening to it again, in advance of us talking. I listened a bit to all of them, but with this one I wound up getting two hours into it! It’s like, ‘Wow, yes, it’s still a really good story.’ It’s a contemporary romance. We’re back in modern times and it’s set in New York City . One of the things that’s so great about the story is that it’s so tied to the city and the main character’s relationships to it. We can’t travel anywhere, but the author makes you feel like you’re wandering around New York City with Meg and Reid. Part of the story is that these characters wind up going on a tour of their own making to find all these different hand-lettered signs around the city. So you’re getting a new appreciation of—or at least I did, I visited New York a lot of times, but I don’t know how much I always paid attention to—these old hand-lettered signs and the history behind them. It’s really fun to listen to and get that out of it. It’s a story that surprised me, because that was something that I didn’t think I would be very interested in, the whole idea of the detailed work of hand lettering. I think a lot of credit goes to the narrator, Nicol, who really highlights all the humour and playfulness of the audiobook. That’s right. Meg is a calligrapher. She has built a business around doing fancy, hand-lettered planners for clients that they’ll have her do once a month to make their lives look interesting. She enjoys it, but she’s also had a bit of a creative block. And this man, Reid, walks back into her life. She’d done his wedding program for him the year before. He comes in saying, ‘You need to tell me why you knew my wedding was a mistake.’ He’s realized there was a code that she had subconsciously written into his wedding program that spelled out the word ‘mistake’. She’s like, ‘That’s terrible, I can’t believe I did that! I don’t want anyone to know.’ But he never did wind up getting married because, for a number of reasons, he realized it was a mistake. As an aside, he also mentions that he hates living in New York and can’t wait to leave. So she decides that he would be a good companion for a tour looking for all these signs—the fun of showing him why she loves New York might spur something in her to get her through her creative block. “Reading romances right now can be such a comfort. You know it’s going to end okay” Another thing I loved about this book is that one of the key conflicts is Meg and her roommate, who have been best friends for a long time, having a falling out. She’s not sure why. Their friendship has changed, her friend is very distant, she’s going to move out of their apartment. So Meg is grieving this lost friendship. And I think that’s something that’s obviously so important in all of our lives, having these close friendships, and that’s not often represented. So the romantic relationship isn’t the only one that’s given prominence in the story. You get that added depth of, ‘How do you figure out new ways of being friends? How do you build new friendships when you’re an adult?’ And Nicol makes you feel just how upset Meg is over this shift in her friendship. It’s really an excellent story. And I don’t want to spoil anything, but it takes a very unexpected turn later on in the audiobook, something I really did not expect at all. It was one that was a surprise to me. Again, I think if somebody wasn’t a regular romance reader, and they were curious about the genre, this is a great one to get started. It’s one of my favourites. I fell into it when I started working at AudioFile. I was seeing all these reviews coming in of audiobooks that sounded so good. I thought I should try it out and see what I thought about it. There’s so much creativity in the genre. We all know the formula for romance is that there are two main characters who are going to fall in love by the end of the book, but the creativity in making a story—that even though you know it’s going to end happily, how are you going to get there?—can be so exciting. Also, I think to many people, reading romances right now can be such a comfort. You know it’s going to end okay, you’re not going to end the book and feel devastated by all the things that the author put the characters through. When there’s so much uncertainty in our lives right now, it can be nice to have that certainty. There was even one I read as an ebook, Whiteout , by Adriana Anders . It’s set in Antarctica and there’s a polar researcher and a cook, who wind up almost being killed by these evil people. They’re trekking across Antarctica and barely making it through alive. Even in the middle of winter and with all the uncertainty that everybody’s facing, the book was exciting and engaging. I knew it was going be okay, but how is the author going to get us there? What is going to happen? It was thrilling reading the book. I think people would think of it first as classics. That’s where I would mentally be putting it. I had read classics like those before I was a regular romance reader. I’d also read a number of young adult romances that I hadn’t really thought of as romance either. That’s another genre that’s so fun and full of a lot of creative writers."