A Novel Love Story by Ashley Poston

4/5 stars

SPOILERS AHEAD

Ashley Poston writes such a specific brand of magic that I just absolutely adore. I don't know how to explain it other than gentle and soft. Maybe warm and fuzzy? A lot of my favorite books have a dark, kind of ethereal magical feel, but every Ashley Poston book feels like a light and romantic kind of magic. She takes a more standard kind of love story and adds a fun supernatural twist that makes the whole thing feel impossibly real.

As a girl in her late twenties who practically lives in her romantasy books, I related to Elsie quite a bit. She was a bit more neurotic and dare I say... annoying, than I think I am, but her overall desire to hide away in her books after a terrible break up is incredible relatable. The other thing that Ashley Poston does well is make me really introspective. I found myself thinking a lot about my own past relationships and the ways in which I lost myself in them, and the way that I've been approaching relationships since (or more realistically, how I've been avoiding relationships since). I think after a bad relationship everyone kind of curls into themselves, but I've spent a very long time actively avoiding getting into another serious one just in case it turns out like the last, just like Elsie. And I guess maybe a little bit like Anders too.

A couple specific lines made me really think about who I am and what I want for my future.

"He could have asked me why I thought he'd care about this history, but I thought it was important. A part of me that was the kind of broken that couldn't be fixed with a cup of coffee or a few pretty words."

I've learned in my past relationships how important it is to be with someone who wants to know everything about you and the reason you are the way you are. The romatic words, the little gestures, are great and so important to a good relationship, but knowing someone's history is the only way to make it last. There's so many things that I do or ways I react that are direct results of my previous relationships, that only make sense when you know those intricate parts of my past.

"I'd highlighted passages, about the way her heart beat brighter whenever Will Carmichael walked into the room, while trying to find those feelings in real life."

I find myself doing this all the time. I love to read about love and I highlight all these passages about the wonderful book boyfriends of the world, but I'm constantly searching for that feeling myself in real life. I don't know if this is giving me unrealistic expectations or if it's just making me keep my standards as high as they should be. Let me know.

"While I didn't need to, I think I wanted to fall in love."

This is the perfect description for how I feel every single time I think about getting into a relationship. I'm perfectly comfortable with my life, and for the most part I'm perfectly happy. I don't need anyone else in my life, but I think it would be nice to be in love the way people are in books. I don't feel like my life is lacking anything without a partner, but who doesn't want to find that special person? The way people fall in love in books just feels so unrealistic and yet I'm holding out for it to maybe one day happen. No pressure. No expectations. Just a potential, maybe someday.

Elsie also struggled a lot with watching her friend's lives move on while she just kind of... stayed. Right now, that's the most relatable thing in the world to me. Being the only single one left out of all my girlfriends and my siblings, watching my sister have a baby and my friends get married while I stay single and living alone in a state that no one else lives in is challenging. I love it and life is very peaceful and fulfilled, but it's hard not to get in your head sometimes about whether or not you're "successful" at where you are in your life. But "success" is different for everyone, and that's just something I need to remind myself of whenever I start comparing my life to those of the people most important to me.

As for the actual book, it was really fun. The idea of accidentally stumbling upon your favorite fictional small town is such a dream. To be honest, I don't know that I would have done what Elsie did and leave. I would have fallen in love with Anders and stayed there, running that bookstore with him forever and spending my days with my favorite book characters and seeing their stories play out. It's like a perfect little Stars Hollow. Anders' story was so heartbreaking and sweet, keeping the town that his ex-fiance wrote alive even in her death, because his grief kept him holding on to her and the last thing she created. But they both left to follow their own story together in the actual world. And Elsie opened up a bookstore with her best friend. Which is exactly what I want to do with my life. And she was like, 32, so I still have a few years to get there myself.

Overall, I just really love Ashley Poston's gently supernatural love stories. Her characters are so easy to relate to because they're all a little broken and so are we all.

I'm realizing now this was definitely more of a whiny, introspection than a book review, but here we are anyways.