Landline by Rainbow Rowell
Published by St. Martin's Press on July 8th 2014
Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance, Fiction, Fantasy
Page: 310
Rating: 5 of 5 stars
Review by: Tina
Synopsis
Georgie McCool knows her marriage is in trouble; it has been in trouble for a long time. She still loves her husband, Neal, and Neal still loves her, deeply — but that almost seems beside the point now.
Maybe that was always beside the point.
Two days before they’re supposed to visit Neal’s family in Omaha for Christmas, Georgie tells Neal that she can’t go. She’s a TV writer, and something’s come up on her show; she has to stay in Los Angeles. She knows that Neal will be upset with her — Neal is always a little upset with Georgie — but she doesn't expect him to pack up the kids and go home without her.
When her husband and the kids leave for the airport, Georgie wonders if she’s finally done it. If she’s ruined everything.
That night, Georgie discovers a way to communicate with Neal in the past. It’s not time travel, not exactly, but she feels like she’s been given an opportunity to fix her marriage before it starts...
Is that what she’s supposed to do?
Or would Georgie and Neal be better off if their marriage never happened?
Review
My current obsession with R.R. lands me on her next book Landlines (I know I'm reading her collection out of order. I want to compare her writing from 5 years ago to now. Plus, I'm saving Carry On for last).
Ouch.
Georgie works too much, she barely sees her kids, she has trouble with her marriage.
This story is heartbreakingly sweet. It begins with an antique, yellow rotary phone she bought at a garage sale back in high school. When her husband took the kids with him to visit his mother for the holidays, she was left behind to work on a new tv pilot. Instead of using that time to crunch, her mind was filled with her husband. She has never separated from him during their 14 years of marriage. And she couldn't return to her cold empty house without him so she stayed with her mother and slept in her old room.
But something strange is happening, each time she dials her husband's cell, he doesn't pick up or wasn't there. The only time he answers is when she calls him from her landline (the antique yellow rotary phone) to his mother's landline. The trippy part was her phone calls to her husband wasn't to Neal, her husband, but to Neal from 1988, her college boyfriend. Was she hallucinating? Did she dial to the past? Was this her second chance? A do-over of her life?
She takes a week long journey of self discovery and recovers what she lost from her youth. She also discovers the reason her husband proposed to her. She didn't know what happened during her college senior year, there was a week, a lost week, of not speaking, and he left her that Christmas...
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