Week 50: Goodnight Tweetheart - Teresa Medeiros (240 pages)

I am in love with love and always have been. This week’s book “Goodnight Tweetheart” is a lovely romantic novel set in 2010 NYC (the most romantic American city??). Very timely and quirky this book was an incredibly fast read. As a matter of fact I finished it in one day over the span of 6 hours. 

In my teen years I would spend hours reading romance novels. Danielle Steel, Johanna Lindsey and Catherine Coulter were my friends who wrote love stories that unfortunately helped to form my misbegotten knowledge of men! Sometimes the “members” did throb – other times, not so much. And sometimes the coming together was so sadly un-romantic that I was sure I had done something wrong. As I grew older and my pleasure in reading these books was deemed “guilty” I started to back away from the genre. But – lingering in my mind – was a love. I could read “Outlander” by Gabaldon – not outwardly romantic, but epic in scope and breadth and thank goodness for Philippa Gregory and her tales of “The Other Boleyn Sister” (steamy stuff with history thrown in)! So when I came across this book at Borders, I was intrigued. I got a love story with pop culture references thrown in – bonus!

The story is about author Abby Donovan who was the literary “it” girl when her debut novel was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. We find her four years after the fact with a colossal case of writer’s block and a book deadline that looms in front of her like the Grand Canyon. She “meets” Mark on Twitter and embarks on a fantastic ride. This book is very different from those classic romance books that I was a big fan of in my younger years. There was no sex in this book, no bodices ripping, no members – throbbing or otherwise and very little “language”. The story is told in 90% Tweets (those lovely conversations using 140 characters or less). The correspondence is perfect and genuine and quite fitting. Since it is a romantic novel – things go sideways and there is a push to set things straight, but I must say that although I had a hope as to how the book would end – I was surprised at the path the author took us down to reach the conclusion.

I love reading and I love escapist reading. Sometimes I like to learn new things, but often when I read, I want to suspend disbelief and enter someone else’s world. I can’t say how much I loved this book and how lovely it was to enter the world of Abby and Mark – it was all I could do not to look them up on Twitter and join in their conversation. This is a perfect book to read on a cold (ish) winter night. It definitely warmed my heart. My pleasure is my pleasure – others can call it guilty, I call it fun to read!