I’m researching ‘uplit’ fiction at the moment because I’ve been told that my latest book fits into that genre. I hadn’t heard of the term before but Googled it and found various examples, including this wonderful, joyous book by Josie Silver.
It’s a thoroughly heartwarming, feelgood tale about thwarted love at first sight. It tells the tale of a girl, Laurie, seeing a boy, Jack, from a bus ‘one day in December’ and falling instantly in love with him. She spends the next year trying to find him, gives up, then finally meets him again — on the arm of her best friend, Sarah. The next ten years are filled with missed opportunities and heartbreak and tested friendship.
It is not a particularly unusual tale, or indeed an unpredictable one, but what really sets the book apart is the truly beautiful writing, and the element of poignancy at the missed chances. It doesn’t matter that, ultimately, the story is almost cliched and you know that Jack and Laurie will end up together. You are happy to go on this journey with them, because the perfectly polished, heart-breaking language elevates it.
Memorable lines include:
We are a triangle, but our sides have kept changing length. Nothing has ever been quite equal. Perhaps it’s time for us to learn to stand alone, rather than lean on each other.
‘Your place is not somewhere. It’s someone.’
The book is peppered with elegantly constructed, thoughtful sentences which seem to sum up so neatly the human condition of love and how the path to happiness is never straightforward. ‘He hurt me, but he hurt himself more’; ‘You take up too much of my heart, and it’s not fair on my husband’ (something which Laurie says to herself rather than out loud to Jack); ‘His eyes say all the things he cannot. And I silently tell him that I’ll always carry him in my heart‘; ‘He promises me he can paper over the cracks of my broken heart’. This book is all about unspoken words and missed opportunities.
The other interesting element is the structure: it flips between Laurie’s point of view and Jack’s, so that we the reader know each character’s thoughts but the other doesn’t. We know that Jack remembers Laurie from the bus stop; we know he feels the same way as her; we know she doesn’t really, truly, properly love Oscar, the man she marries. It just adds to the whole element of frustration at their plight. We are shouting at the book, crying ‘why doesn’t one of them just get brave and say something’?
A surprisingly enjoyable read, with perfect pacing as the story unfolds and captivating language. I will read Josie Silver again.