Anna Alessi is a history professor in England, forcing herself to go online dating in order to meet the one. She has mostly gotten over a traumatic history of intense bullying from what in America would be called her high school years. The book begins with Anna in high school. Her secret crush, James Fraser, asks if she wants to do a duet at the final school lip sync show. But he just leaves her on stage, laughs at her, and calls her an elephant while the rest of the school throws candies at her. It was premeditated and appallingly mean.
Now, many years later Anna has transformed herself into someone literally unrecognizable after losing about fifty pounds (not the best of tropes). She goes to her high school reunion for closure--or something. James Fraser and his friends are there, but they don't even know who she is. Shortly thereafter, Anna is helping out with a museum exhibition and James's company is brought on for some of the tech. Anna and James have to work together, and he still doesn't know who she is.
At first Anna is very prickly and defensive with James, which he doesn't understand. But slowly the two start getting along better. and even become friends. But one day, they go to Anna's place and James sees an old picture of Anna and the truth is out. James barely remembers what he did to her, and thinks she's making too big a deal out of it.
Eventually James understands how miserable Anna's life was in high school and properly apologizes. There are also some side stories with Anna's sister and James's wife.
I think its pretty gutsy to have a main character do something so mean in the very beginning of the book, and then bring him back as the romantic hero. The problem for me is that it didn't work. I know he was only sixteen and sixteen year old's are especially stupid with undeveloped brains. But there's a difference between stupid and cruel. And I never got the sense that James changed enough for me to really trust him. He consistently seemed low on the caring about other's feelings scale. And he didn't have any good relationships. He hated his best friend and coworkers and had nothing in common with his wife. He didn't know who he was. Even though he supposedly figured this out at the end of the book, he still went back to his wife before finally deciding he should stick with Anna. Their relationship didn't feel very romantic to me.
Anna was more sympathetic, but a lot of her character was just her looking to get married, which seemed a little tiresome. I'm also not a huge fan of the losing weight to become an entirely different, and very hot, person. I might have preferred if Anna had stayed the same and James had changed into a more substantive adult who noticed and cared about other people who weren't as hot as him. I love McFarlane, but I don't think this one aged as well as some of her others.
No comments:
Post a Comment