Book Review: *Love or Something Like It* by Deirdre Shaw

Love or Something Like It: A Novel by Deirdre Shaw
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Random House (April 14, 2009)
ISBN-13: 978-1400067701

Back-of-the-book blurb: When Lacey Brennan meets Toby, a sweet and talented comedian, she impulsively moves across the country to be with him in Los Angeles.  Lacey is unsure of what she is looking for out west–love? a new career? an escape from her fractured family?–but is reassured when Toby proposes on her thirtieth birthday.  “I was thirty and I finally knew what I was doing,” she says.

In California, which Lacey calls “the edge of the earth,” she has the giddy, anticipatory feeling that anything can happen–opportunity looms large, and her life may yet turn out the way she wants it to.  But soon in her marriage with Toby, from their awkward honeymoon in Paris to their desperate attempts to build careers, Lacey knows that something is wrong.  Meanwhile, her twin brother has dropped off the face of the earth, and Lacey begins to wonder whether she and Toby should start a family if she can’t even figure out her own.  It is only after Lacey has given up on both L.A. and love that she gets an unexpected shot at happiness.

She is Too Fond of Books’ review: I enjoyed Love or Something Like It, Deirdre Shaw’s debut novel.  Lacey Brennan, the main character, convincingly narrates the story, telling of her hopes and dreams of living happily-ever-after with Toby.  She moves to Tinseltown to be with him and imagines a future with him as a successful screenwriter, days full of interesting people, and nights full of interesting parties and “see and be seen” events.

The dream is short-lived, as Shaw portrays in wrenching scenes describing their wedding, honeymoon, and the few months following.  One of the strongest scenes occurs on their honeymoon, when Lacey is  shocked by her new husband’s actions which demonstrate how immature and unsure he is.  One ten-page chapter is a very personal experience told in a  second-person narration, distancing Lacey from the event, as if it’s just too much for the character to handle; the effect is gripping.

Lacey struggles to fit in on the West Coast, wondering if she is perhaps better suited to an East Coast lifestyle.  She may be fooling herself, as she is convinced that men in New York are more mature and less capricious:

I tried occasionally to look at it from [his] perspective.  I was sure that being the sole breadwinner for family was quite a stressful.  But still.  That was what you signed up for when you made the successful transition to adulthood, even if you did wake up one day and realize that marriage and children might be what most people wanted, but not what you wanted.  Well, too late.  You can’t take a marriage back, and you sure as hell can’t take a child back.  Grow up … Grow up and be a man and live up to your responsibilities.

This kind of thing wasn’t happening to my friends back home.  On the East Coast my friends’ husbands seemed to be taking adulthood in stride.  … They were not going around acting like Peter Pan, pretending to be children forever.

There are a few dramatic moments in the book, but for the most part the story unfolds steadily but leisurely.  There is a lot of introspection as Lacey sorts out who she is and where she’s going:

… I wondered if it would ever end, this searching again for a life that I both wanted and did not want, and sometimes I felt exposed, threatened, vulnerable, left alone in the wilderness.  I felt like anyone could just come along and snatch me off the street, and then I prayed that someone would.  I started to feel less like a hole that needed filling and more like a ball bouncing into traffic.  Alone, I was untethered, unpredictable, unknown.  I was a wild boom, a lightning bolt, a tree about to fall in the forest.

Love or Something Like It is an intimate look through one woman’s eyes as she tries to find her place in relationships, her family and her career; before she can find her place in the world, she must learn to be at ease within herself.  The novel is a nice choice for a book group discussion.

About the author:  Read more about Deirdre Shaw and Love or Something Like at her website.  You can also read an excerpt online.

FTC disclosure: I borrowed this book from my friend Kristine.