Landline by Rainbow Rowell

Rating: 3/5 stars

“Neal didn’t take Georgie’s breath away. Maybe the opposite. But that was okay–that was really good, actually, to be near someone who filled your lungs with air.”

 Georgie McCool is a comedy television writer with a marriage she knows is falling apart. Her husband, Neal, never says that he’s unhappy but certainly never acts like the college junior he was when Georgie first met him. She misses those days before everything went downhill, before her job took off and she spent more and more time at the office. Georgie finds herself with a magic phone, the yellow landline phone in her old room, that can talk to the old Neal from when they first started dating. Georgie has to figure out if this is her chance to fix things with Neal or end the relationship before they even get married.

Like the last Rainbow Rowell book that I reviews (Attachments), this book was just okay. The plot was fairly interesting, but the writing wasn’t anything spectacular. I usually tab quotes that I liked and stood out to me while I read, but I left Landline without any sticky tabs. In fact, I got the quotation at the beginning of this review by Googling “Landline quotes”. It seems like almost everyone excepts for me absolutely adores Rainbow Rowell. I don’t really see the hype.

This is a good, light book for someone who doesn’t have a lot of time to read. It was easy to skim some chapters, as a lot of the dialogue wasn’t crucial to the main plot. I did think that the flashbacks to Georgie and Neal first meeting and dating in college were cute, but the novel as a whole was a little bland. I think my problem with Rowell’s writing style is that it’s very young adult-like. I know she has written best-selling young adult novels and I think she has a hard time crossing over to the adult genre. Maybe if I read one of her YA novels I will appreciate her writing more.