Recent Reading: Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell

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Recent Reading: Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell

All right, so, I’ve read a few other books by Rainbow Rowell; in particular:

Attachments, which I liked a lot – I like epistolary novels – and I think Rowell pulled off the difficult romance in this story, which was, essentially, “I fell in love with you because I got to know you while spying on you, can we possibly have a future?” So that’s a difficult situation.

Fangirl, which I loved very much. This is my favorite of Rowell’s so far.

Carry On, which is the fictional Harry Potter-adjacent fanfic the protagonist is writing in Fangirl, so it’s a neat meta concept as well as being a story that stands on its own. I doubt I would have read it except for its connection to Fangirl. I liked it a lot more than I expected, but I didn’t go on with the second or third books in that series.

I haven’t read the well-known Eleanor and Park, which I think might have been Rowell’s debut book, successful enough to kick her permanently up to semi-household-name status, meaning people who like contemporary YA have probably read at least some of her books. E&P might be on my TBR pile – I don’t actually remember whether I picked up the full book, a sample, or just have it vaguely on my radar. I haven’t read her Landline either, and in fact I’m not sure I knew about that one before I wrote this post.

But, for whatever reason, when I opened another story by Rowell, it wasn’t E&P, it was her newer one, Slow Dance. Which I note is just $1.99 at the time I’m writing this post (which was earlier this week, not ten minutes ago).

***

Back in high school, everybody thought Shiloh and Cary would end up together … everybody but Shiloh and Cary. They were just friends. Best friends. They spent entire summers sitting on Shiloh’s porch steps, dreaming about the future. They promised each other than, no matter what, their friendship would never change. …

Now [Cary is a lieutenant commander in the Navy], Shiloh’s thirty-three, and it’s been fourteen years since she talked to Cary. She’s been married and divorced. She has two kids. And she’s back living in the same house she grew up in. Her life is nothing like she planned.

When she’s invited to an old friend’s wedding, all Shiloh can think about is whether Cary will be there – and whether she hopes he will be. Would Cary even want to talk to her? After everything?

The answer is yes. And yes. And yes.

***

Okay, so, this story definitely didn’t bump Fangirl from its place as my favorite book by Rainbow Rowell. I didn’t like it as much as any of her other books. I started reading it last year some time, drifted away from it, came back and read a bit more of it, drifted away again … and finally read the last quarter of it, maybe the final fifth, much faster and with a lot more enthusiasm, a few days ago. This is not generally the way I read novels. To be fair, it’s becoming more common. Even so, when I drift away from a novel, I don’t usually go back to it.

So, I read Fangirl fast, Carry On fast, Landline in basically one sitting. what is different about this story?

Well, first, it’s a braided novel. Past and present are braided together, and so are Shiloh and Cary’s points of view. I don’t object to this, theoretically. I’m fine with braided structures, including complicated braided structures, which this is. Rowell sets this up with a present-day meeting between Shiloh and Cary at this wedding, then does a flashback to high school, and then the structure becomes complicated because the flashbacks aren’t in chronological order, or I don’t think they are. Frankly, I lost track. This definitely isn’t a simple alternating present/past structure, because, for example, the first eight chapters are present-present-present-past-past-past-present-past, and so on.

I think the first fifteen or so chapters are from Shiloh’s pov and then we get the first Cary pov chapter, and I know for sure I lost interest for a while at that point. Switching pov is hard for me, especially if I didn’t expect it, and after that many chapters from Shiloh’s pov, I didn’t expect it here. It’s worse if the pov switch happens during a period of misunderstanding or regret or some other negative emotion is going on during and after the switch, which is also the case here.

Also, another thing, the chapters are very short. There are 84 chapters in 390 pages, which is an average of 4.8 pages per chapter. But this is an average. Some chapters are just a page long. (I don’t know why I’m seeing pages in ebooks now, either.)

Actually, I don’t even know that I’d call all these things “chapters.” A lot of them, maybe the majority, are actually vignettes. They don’t really have the structure of chapters, and maybe that’s because each vignette is suspended in time, as it were, because the story is being told so thoroughly out of order. In particular, most chapters set in the past are really vignettes, while most of the present-day chapters are really chapters (I think. I really did lose track).

So, there we are, with a complicated braided structure, consisting of short chapters and even shorter vignettes, shifting from the present day to various moments in the past. Which is a lot to handle, and I expect it gave Rowell absolute fits to put this together. It might be intellectually interesting to label the 84 chapters with time cues and two words about what’s going on in each chapter and see if it’s possible to figure out why Rowell settled on the final order of scenes she chose, but I’m not going to do that because it’s more trouble than I want to go to.

But the more important issue for me was, I really did not like Shiloh much as a person. Or rather, I didn’t like her much as a pov character; she’s all right as a person, I suppose. Young Shiloh got in her own way so much, which is frustrating, and Present-Day Shiloh kind of does too, which is also frustrating. I liked Cary better as a pov character, but he was secondary – we don’t get as many scenes from his pov. And he’s so into Shiloh. Which is fine, I guess. But he is nonverbal at the most irritating times. I don’t think I was entirely sold on this relationship because I just didn’t like Shiloh all that much, and I particularly didn’t like Young Shiloh. (She did improve.) (To be fair, so did Cary.)

Also, the heart of the problem was very much lack of communication. Plus being young and kind of idiotic, but mostly it’s lack of communication. This really is one of the stories where you want to shake the protagonists and shout, “Tell him what you’re thinking! Tell him what you’re feeling! And you – tell her what you’re thinking and feeling!”

***

I really should say here that I liked the latter quarter or fifth of the story a lot better. Present-Day Shiloh is an improvement on Young Shiloh, she and Cary finally have various important conversations, and honestly, they might not – probably would not – have been able to sort things out as well as kids as they can now that they’re in their thirties. It’s realistic for them to have these serious miscommunication problems when they’re eighteen. The way they’re shown at that age, it’s honestly hard to see how they could have gotten their lives in order at that point.

I will just note in passing that, from my current perspective, getting your life in order when you’re thirty-three doesn’t seem like it’s THAT slow, either.

But my point is, both protagonists are indeed more mature and that’s fine. They both have lives, and I did like seeing them work out their present-day problems, which have much less to do with lack of communication and a lot more to do with complicated family relationships, so that was far better.

There are some great moments in this story as Shiloh and Cary finally work things out. I like this a lot:

Shiloh led him downstairs. She’d been planning on not touching him in front of her children. But the landscape of her worries had shifted. She held his hand.

Cary has had a rough day, and I like this idea about Shiloh having a plan about how to handle this relationship in front of her children, but now the landscape of her worries has shifted. That’s a great line, and it’s also the right choice, a good decision from Shiloh, which is nice to see.

One of the funniest bits is when Cary puts on his dress whites to visit his mother in a nursing home type of place – his mom likes to see him in uniform – and then

When they got out of the car, Cary produced a very impressive hat. White, with a black brim and a big gold anchor. “You look like a cruise ship captain!”

“No, they look like me.”

I might have laughed out loud. Plus, the whole thing with Cary’s mother and complicated family, and Shiloh’s kids and her complicated family, this was all handled really well and I liked this part of the story a lot. Also the way Cary and Shiloh finally worked out their relationship and their lives.

So … I wound up liking this story. But it was astonishingly slow for me for an astonishingly long time. I would literally put it aside for a month or more at a time. And yes, I was doing stuff that slowed me down, but if a story is really catchy, I read it, and this wasn’t.

I should start a list of “novels I eventually finish,” because the list of novels that take me months to read but that I actually do finish is really short. I can think of just a few others offhand, such as Dorothy Dunnett’s Niccolo series, where a horrible thing happened and I literally set the series aside for five years or so before going back to it and finishing it. At least I can say this wasn’t that bad.

But it doesn’t make me want to move Eleanor and Park or Landline up to the top of my TBR list, either.

Fangirl is really good, by the way. And Attachments. If you’ve read Carry On and the sequels, what do you all think of the other two Simon Snow books?

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