B-
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Inspirational, Romance
Theme: Enemies to Lovers, Epistolary
Archetype: Writer/Author/Librarian
Editor’s note: Catherine passed away suddenly last week, and we will miss her very, very much. This is her last review for us. May her memory be a blessing.
…
Content warning: Savannah’s family is low-grade terrible. Also, there is an instance of workplace sexual harassment which gets shut down fairly fast by the boss, but might be triggering for some.
Meet Me In the Margins is a sweet, funny, epistolary novel about writing and publishing and getting out of your own head.
Savannah is an editor at a very highbrow literary publishing house, and she is also secretly working on the manuscript of her romance novel. When she accidentally leaves it in her hidey-hole at work, and comes back to see that someone has left editorial commentary in the margins, she is initially mortified. But when her manuscript is rejected with very similar commentary, she decides to ask her Mystery Editor for help.
I’m always a fan of stories where two people are writing to each other but they don’t know who they are writing to, and one thing that made this story particularly enjoyable for me is that Savannah and her Mystery Editor (who we shall call M.E. for the purposes of spoiler avoidance) don’t hate each other. Quite often with this trope, the secret correspondent turns out to be the real-life nemesis, and it was a pleasant change to find that Savannah and M.E. actually rather liked each other and were attracted to each other in real life.
Instead, the tension in this story comes from the fact that while the M.E. knows exactly whose work he is editing, Savannah thinks that her correspondent is someone completely different. A Big Misunderstanding, in other words, but one that works, because their written interactions are such a delicious game that I can absolutely understand why neither of them wants to spoil it.
I also enjoyed the way the processes of writing and editing were depicted. I could absolutely relate to Savannah endlessly tweaking and editing and correcting her story until it was unrecognisable. I also loved the way her own experience of being edited made her think differently about her own editing. It’s important to Savannah to be a ‘nice’ editor but there’s a balance between being direct enough to be useful, and framing critiques in a way that an author will be able to hear without becoming so defensive that the critiques are no longer useful. Reading this story, I found myself thinking about the relationship between writer and editor, and the ways in which the qualities of a good editor might mirror those of a good romantic partner. After all, writing can be a very personal thing, and letting someone read the unedited work of your imagination requires a good deal of trust.
Speaking of the writer/editor relationship, I thoroughly enjoyed the progression in the marginalia from impersonal:
Slow beginning. Get to the meat. Give readers a reason to stay. If you bore them, you lose them. Awkward word choice?
Drop this paragraph.
To friendly:
He sounds like a serial killer.
Furthermore, what two people stand there murmuring delightedly about their drinks in the pickup line at a coffee shop? Illogical.
And for the love of all, pick different names. This is not an opera. You can have Renaldo. You can have Cecilia. You cannot have both.
To flirtatious:
– Okay, okay, I get it. I’ll take out the blind-date scene. But geez, that’s pretty embarrassing Mystery E.
– Then I trust you can keep that little secret between you and me.
– Or use it in my next manuscript…
– You wouldn’t dare.
– Wouldn’t I?
– Not if I’m editing it…
Because by this stage they are leaving the manuscript for each other several times a day and using the margins as much for conversation as for editorial notes.
OK, so now I want to talk about the relationship, which means – spoiler! – I need to talk about who the Mystery Editor is. Which, honestly, I think most readers will guess within twenty seconds, because we know how romance novels work, but just in case, here be spoilers, spoilers ahoy!
So the Mystery Editor is Will Pennington, who has recently started working as a senior editor at the company where Savannah is an editorial assistant. He is not her direct boss… but he is her boss’s boss. And also the son of the founder and director of the company.
And look, Will is quite lovely, in a buttoned-down, Mr Darcy sort of way, and it’s clear that he is the sort of boss who cares about his employees and wants to make sure they are looked after and happy in their work. But nonetheless, I was really, really uncomfortable with the professional ethics of this situation. Savannah doesn’t report to him directly, but he seeks her out several times to chat about how she thinks things are going at the company, and makes personnel decisions *about her direct supervisors* based at least in part on her judgment, which YIKES.
I mean, they seem to be good personnel decisions, but then again, this book is told in the first person from Savannah’s point of view so they probably would look like good personnel decisions to her. (Somewhere, Alison at Ask A Manager is getting a migraine, and she doesn’t know why.)
The situation is every so slightly mitigated by the fact that the actual romance between Savannah and Will doesn’t happen until the last few pages at the book, at which point she is about to become a published author and I think not quite so directly in his chain of command, but it wasn’t clear whether she would still be working as an editor as well.
It all felt a little bit uncomfortable.
Speaking of the fact that the book is told from Savannah’s point of view, it’s also worth noting that we don’t really see much of Will’s character arc. Will is clearly attracted to Savannah from the start, but we don’t get to see many details as his feelings develop.
There are some really delightful bits of comedy in this story. I wasn’t a fan of the meet cute at the start, mostly because I recently broke my ankle in a manner that was so similar to this scene that I had to read it three times to assure myself that Savannah had just fallen over, no harm done. But I loved pretty much every scene involving Savannah’s friend Lyla, and there is a pretty glorious sequence at a court house on Valentine’s Day which I will not spoil for you, but which I think is one of Will’s kindest and funniest moments in the entire book.
I also have to tell you that the ending is CHEESY SO SO SO SO CHEESY AND MADE OF CHEESE.
Very sweet cheese.
(Cheesecake?)
(No, really not cheesecake – this is a closed door romance, we’ll be having no naughtiness here!)
Overall, this was a really fun read, especially if you enjoy stories about writers and writing. I liked the humour, and I really enjoyed the friendship between M.E. and Savannah. While I had some (ok, many) misgivings about their professional relationship, I found their romantic relationship both convincing and charming.
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I’m wondering if the element of the male interest guiding the female interest with superior wisdom is what appealed to a Christian publisher?
@Omphale: It’s definitely true that “woman needs to be guided by man” is an annoying staple of Christian romance. However, since “female professional sex therapist needs to learn sex from some dude” is a popular trope in non-Christian romance, this kind of sexist tripe is clearly not just a Christian problem.
I was more interested in this before I learned it was a Christian publisher.
Can anyone say how much of an inspie this is? I am really not a fan of inspirationasl or Christian content, but this sounds cute.
I’d love a good publishing-set romance, but this one has a lot of trope nope for me.
We’ll miss you, Catherine Heloise. <3
Lana: After reading your comment I got curious too, so I looked at some reader reviews, and to quote one of them:
This book is a sweet, slower-than-molasses burn romance. It’s clean with no profanity or violence, and I realized after starting the book that this is a Christian publisher, but aside from the fact that it’s a clean read, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that.
In fairness to them, Thomas Nelson has been expanding their catalog from Straight Christian Works for several years now. (Every once in a while, someone at A Major Newspaper “discovers” this and writes about it.) “This is not your mother’s Thomas Nelson” isn’t necessarily true, but it’s not wrong.
That said, 360-degree reviews have become common in corporate culture–in America, at least; maybe not so in Australia?–so I’m not seeing a necessary conceptual problem with the boss’s boss adjusting roles of her bosses based in part on her feedback. especially if she’s not the first one to have said such things.
@Merle definitely did not want to imply that this particular strain of sexism was limited to Christian romance. Just more interested in what made this story particularly appropriate for the Christian marketplace (other than being heterosexual and closed-door).
Contemporary workplace romances are very much not my cup o’ trope, so I probably won’t be checking this book out. But I would be interested if anyone does read it and can identify additional elements that are more obviously coded for their target audience.
(I remember reading a fascinating breakdown of the Twilight series as Mormon fantasy on live journal many years ago, and it added such a rich context to the story.)
I wish this wasn’t a workplace romance because they are such a rope a nope for me. I don’t care how sweet they are, they are lawsuits in waiting.
This is a lovely review though and CH will be much missed.
So many of the books I own or borrowed were because of Catherine Heloise’s reviews. She will be missed, but never forgotten when I look at my shelves.
I literally just finished it. I picked it up because I love romances with an epistolary element and also, I work as an editor, and I can say I didn’t notice anything Christian-y about it (not being American, or from another English-speaking country for that matter, I had no clue this was a Christian publisher).
It is very clean (I guess that’s the most Christian thing about it), very sweet, very slow-burn. I loved the interactions between the main characters but other than that (and the editorial element) it was a bit… meh. (Which coincidently is my usual comment for the stuff I edit.)
Meh, that’s a disapointment.
(I meant that the book is less-than-good, natch! Catherine Heloise’s review was terrific, I’ll miss her reviews on the site).
How poignant to see Catherine’s last review.
I have a weakness for books with epistolary content so will definitely be looking for this.
I’m so sad to hear about Catherine Heloise’s last review. My condolences to her friends, family, and the people here at Smart Bitches. May her memory be a blessing.
I finished Melissa Ferguson’s ‘Meet Me in the Margins’ but, in retrospect, I wish I had spared myself the irritation. The plot is certainly clever and engaging and had lots of potential. However:
1. In my view the author’s writing style is poor (e.g. stringing a large number of words together as an adjective distracts and does not make reading easier; writing a 3-word sentence as 3 separate 1-word sentences is a clumsy way of emphasising a point; and there are lots of other examples of distracting idiosyncraties in the writing).
2. The role of sexual feelings and sexual attraction in relationships is almost totally ignored and makes the romantic relationships in the story sterile and unrealistic.
3. Choosing to write the story in the 1st person was a mistake, in my view, as having an omniscient author writing in the 3rd person allows for much deeper character development and better understanding of interactions than when everything is seen through the narrow vision of a single character. And to set the record straight, it is not an epistolary novel in the true sense.