A small town celebrity romance by Annabel Monaghan
I grabbed this one off the new romance shelf at my local library when I stopped in to pick up a hold, largely at random: I liked the color of the cover, and the blurbs promising something funny, heartwarming, and good-hearted, all the kinds of things I’ve discovered I like in my romance reading. (I am definitely a rom-com fan …)
And I wasn’t disappointed: it is funny, heartwarming, and good-hearted, if occasionally frustrating.
Nora is a scriptwriter for The Romance Channel (a stand-in for Hallmark), successful at churning out formulaic but popular stories that follow the typical romance beats of the big city guy/gal who falls for a small town gal/guy and gives up their life in the fast lane for village life charms. When her husband leaves her, though, she writes a decidedly darker screenplay that her agent sells to a major studio.
The story opens when the production company descends on Nora’s upstate New York home for several days of location shooting, including the stars Leo Vance and Naomi Sanchez. Nora is intrigued and then annoyed at the interruption to her routine life of ferrying her two kids to school and activities, and looks forward to a return to normal when the shooting wraps up.
Leo, however, doesn’t want to leave when the camera crews pack up: he offers to pay Nora a thousand dollars a day to let him stay in the little tea house out back where she does her writing.
So begins Leo’s love affair with small town life: sunrises on the porch, running errands, the kids’ activities (including helping Nora’s son’s school production of “Oliver!”), and, soon enough, Nora herself. Nora is sure that a fling with a movie star will only end in heartbreak, but Leo is insistent that his feelings for her are genuine.
When he’s called away to start filming a new movie, Leo promises to return, but then vanishes from Nora’s life, leaving her bereft: disappointed but, alas, not surprised.
The conflict at the heart of this story could pretty easily have been resolved if the characters had communicated with each other, but then there’d be no story. While I found it frustrating at times that both Nora and Leo failed to bridge a very narrow chasm indeed, I did enjoy this novel quite a bit: the characters are lively, and the writing is good. It was refreshing to have a romance featuring older characters (both approaching 40) with some miles on their lives.
Because Nora makes her living writing romance stories, “Nora Goes Off Script” is wryly aware of its genre and tropes. It plays a bit with the conventions, but not enough to twist them out of shape; Nora may go a bit off her own script when she falls for Leo, but “Nora Goes Off Script” itself is very much on point.
My only complaint is that the last quarter felt a bit rushed. I was just getting used to Nora’s recovery from having her heart broken by Leo when we’re suddenly thrust into a whirlwind of Oscar parties, celebrity meetings, and then a little child-in-peril chase that wraps up maybe just a bit too neatly. But we get our promised happily-ever-after conclusion, and the warm Freudenfreude of seeing characters we like succeed. For a quick, happy read, I definitely recommend “Nora Goes Off Script.”
