Title: Landline
Author: Rainbow Rowell
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press 2014
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 331
Rating: 2/5 stars
Reading Challenges:
Georgie McCool knows her marriage is in trouble. That it's been in trouble for a long time. She still loves her husband, Neal, and Neal still loves her, deeply-but that almost seems beside the point now.
Maybe that was always beside the point.
Two days before they're supposed to visit Neal's family in Omaha for Christmas, Georgie tells Neal that she can't go. She's a TV writer, and something's come up on her show; she has to stay in Los Angeles. She knows that Neal will be upset with her-Neal is always a little upset with Georgie-but she doesn't expect to him to pack up the kids and go without her.
When her husband and the kids leave for the airport, Georgie wonders if she's finally done it. If she's ruined everything.
That night, Georgie discovers a way to communicate with Neal in the past. It's not time travel, not exactly, but she feels like she's been given an opportunity to fix her marriage before it starts. . . .
Is that what she's supposed to do?
Or would Georgie and Neal be better off if their marriage never happened?
Hmmm… a Christmas love story? I’m not sure that I would agree with this categorization. I could not connect to any character in the story. Georgie was very fustrating as a lead character. She’s supposed to find out that she needs to reconnect with her husband and children and not spend so much time at work. Clearly, this was the lesson right from page one. And yet, we have to spend hundreds of pages slowly moving towards that realization. There’s nothing new about this story. I was thoroughly bored. As an extra annoying piece, I could not understand exactly why Georgie ever fell for Neil in the first place. All we ever see of Neil is a sad sack of a man. We don’t get to see any personality from him. And Georgie’s constant reassurances that Neil is amazing just don’t give us anything. I was completely bored this entire book.
Next up on the TBR pile:
