Rant
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance
Theme: Forced Proximity (stranded, safehouse, etc)
Archetype: Actor/Actress/Celebrity
Reading Roomies was a bizarre experience. I had two reactions simultaneously. One was great enjoyment in a lovely romance with great characters and dialogue and a comforting fairy tale atmosphere. The other was of pure, blinding rage brought on by the political and social issues that currently crowd my brain.
The clearest way to describe these two reviews, which are at odds with one another, is to imagine viewing them through a zoom lens. For this first review, the lens is very, very close to the book. The story takes up the entire frame. The book exists in a space entirely its own, without a larger context.
ZOOM IN:
Roomies, a contemporary stand-alone romance by Christina Lauren, is sweet, comforting, and sexy. Holland, our heroine, has a crush on Calvin, a busker. Calvin is in the United States illegally and Holland, who is hiding the fact that she has a crush, offers to marry Calvin so that he can apply for legal residency and thus be eligible for a major role in the orchestra of a hit Broadway play (think Hamilton levels of hit). The story is told in first-person, from Holland’s point of view.
Holland’s New York City is a dream version of New York. No one sees a rat or a bedbug. Holland’s uncle, who adores her, provides Holland with a job in his theater, so she sees everything that happens backstage. He also subsidizes her rent, so she has a comfortable apartment and some spending money. There are descriptions of good food, nice clothes, nightlife, and enough backstage drama to thrill the heart of any drama geek.
The best thing about the book is how Calvin and Holland appreciate each other. There’s a lot of contrast in how Calvin’s talent manifests itself and how Holland’s does. Calvin’s talent is obvious to everyone and Calvin is confident in his musical abilities. The passages that describe his playing are simply gorgeous. Holland makes it possible for him to share this talent with a vast audience. Meanwhile, Holland doesn’t recognize her talents at all. Seeing Calvin pick up on gifts that no one else notices was incredibly sweet.
Towards the end the misunderstandings pile up in a ridiculous manner, and then everything gets resolved very quickly. However, one of the cute elements of the ending is the recognition that everything has NOT been resolved. Only the most important thing has been resolved (Calvin and Holland’s feelings towards each other) and that means that Holland can finally trust in her happy ending. It’s a sweet story that could be a comforting read in cynical times.
Without looking at the larger context that frames my experience of this book, I would give it a B+.
And now, we zoom out, so that this book resides in the reality of 2017, the year in which is was published, and shares space in my brain with my awareness of the world in which I, and this book, exist.
ZOOM OUT:
Here’s my political lighting review. WARNING: RANT AHEAD.
Allow me to preface this rant with two disclaimers. The first is that this rant is not a commentary on the feasibility of the plot of Roomies. I am not an expert on immigration, and the issues around immigration that have me ripping out my hair don’t necessarily apply to Calvin and Holland.
The second disclaimer is that the rant I am about to unleash is not directed towards the authors or the publisher or anyone else specifically connected to this book. Roomies comes from a long tradition of “green card related” romantic comedy. The most famous example is probably Green Card, the movie from 1990. This is a very well-established trope in romance. Alas, the lightness of that comedy and the trope it uses does not translate as well to 2017.
In the last twelve months, the discrimination and persecution of immigrants, particularly immigrants of color, has been even worse than usual, which is saying a lot. As of this writing, the Supreme Court has upheld the latest version of Trump’s travel ban, which bars people from Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea, Yemen, Somalia, Chad, and some of Venezuela from entering the country regardless of their status (there are some exceptions).
Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials (ICE) have been increasingly aggressive about arresting undocumented immigrants at their most vulnerable moments in areas that used to be considered safe (hospitals, courtrooms, school zones, and during required and routine check-ins, for instance).
Because of my emotional entanglement with this political situation, every time I started to relax and enjoy the good writing and sexy romance of Roomies, I was struck again by absolute rage at the way this country treats immigrants and the disconnect between the brutality faced by so many and the relative ease of Calvin’s immigration process. Then the rant would begin:
How DARE this country arrest people, almost always people of color, as they drive their children to school or get medical care for their children, or undergo surgery?
How DARE we have the temerity to arrest women in court as they desperately seek protection from abusers and arrest people when they do their routine and required check-ins?
How DARE we do these things and then have the UNMITIGATED GALL to think that it’s cute for two white people to marry to fool immigration? How DARE this one white dude get in just by filling out a shit ton of paperwork and sending some fake texts? How dare he avoid deportation while being one of the most visible people in the country?
I can’t separate my fury over immigration law and policy from this book. Given the high profile of news about immigration in 2017, I thought this book was very well written, but poorly timed. I could not disengage the story from the larger context in which it and I currently exist, and so I had two very different reactions.
Zoom very, very far out, with a view of the entire country:
If you want to influence immigration policy, please call your representatives and ask them to support the DREAM Act and oppose the travel ban.
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‘How DARE we do these things and then have the UNMITIGATED GALL to think that it’s cute for two white people to marry to fool immigration? How DARE this one white dude get in just by filling out a shit ton of paperwork and sending some fake texts? How dare he avoid deportation while being one of the most visible people in the country?’
Oh my god, this is exactly what I felt while reading this book! Would this be cute or scary/traumatising if Calvin wasn’t a white Irish guy? Would the officer during their interview have had such an ‘Aw, you kids I want to make this work for you!’ attitude towards them if Calvin had been a brown-skinned/’other’-looking?
That’s a very good point regarding being Irish and being illegal. I say that as one of many Irish people who pointed out that the Irish in America were given the nice title of being undocumented but everyone else is illegal.
I enjoyed the book mostly but I’m not sure if I bought the resolution. I LOVE a happy ending but I found myself wondering if one of the big issues that split them up had been addressed or even acknowledged as something they need to talk about later.
My biggest problem with this book was Calvin. He’s from Galway, as am I. He didn’t sound like someone who’d spent all that time in the states. The Galway accent is quite neutral, he’d have been influenced by the NYC inflection by this time. Also, he sounded like he was more Glenn Hansard who is not from Galway. We do not say “tings” instead of “things”. Whoever helped them Irish up this guy…I dunno.
This may seem churlish but I do have an ear for accents on the page, (call it a superpower, lord knows I don’t have many!) and I’m so tired of Oirish accents in books. You want a sexy Irishman, go for it. But for the love of God, make him sound like the part of Ireland he’s supposed to be from!
Learning about romance novels, I keep returning to the idea of fantasy, as in not- reality and of suspending disbelief, as in not – realistic.
Now that I’m trying out contemporary romance, I find not- reality particularly challenging. (And of course, I’m reading for escape, because reality can be so hard. But I’m perverse that way.)
Perhaps writers, and readers, need to create stories that are removed from reality? Hence the disconnect with the world that we all know is out there, but many of us are lucky enough not to suffer?
Let me try to be clearer. Am I unreasonable to expect my genre fiction to reflect the world as it is, rather than some white-washed, rose-tinted simulacrum?
By the way, Ay, it wasn’t that long ago that signs in this country said ‘No Blacks. No Irish. No dogs.’
Thank you. This is such a great review. I ALWAYS appreciate reviewers who point out issues of social justice play out in contemporary romance. I try to do the same thing in the reviews I write.
We know that reading fiction makes people more empathetic, so it seems like a horrible wasted missed opportunity, and infuriatingly tone deaf to have this be the immigration story romance readers will come across this year.
Just a note that traditional publishing is slow. This book might have been acquired up to two years prior to release, when many people who have recently become aware of the plight of immigrants believed the U.S. was a warm and welcoming melting pot. As the current political situation developed, there may have been cringing on the part of the author/publisher as this book moved through channels, but “unfortunate timing” is not catastrophic enough to make the legal nightmare of voiding a publishing contract worthwhile for either side.
OR it may have never crossed anyone’s mind that the topic would be problematic, given the blinders handed out at the gate! (Hey, 90 Day Fiance is still going strong, so somebody still looks at immigration as entertainment.) But there’s an equal possibility the gap between acquisition and publication is to blame for a perception of poor taste or tone deafness regarding a story that might have seemed cute if it had been released a year earlier.
I am not sure how you can say that you aren’t directing your rant at the author/publisher and then go ahead and rant about how you found it hard to reconcile what is happening now with the plot of the book. Sounds like a bit of cognitive dissonance on your part. I feel like you want to defend the author on some level because maybe you like her work or like her personally but really, if you have a problem with the alternate reality of this book then just say that without trying to distance the author from it like she didn’t have anything to do with the book. I do wonder if you would have done that if this maybe was a less favourite or less well known author. I have read many reviews on this site where the alternate reality/unrealistic nature of the world created has led to a bad review.
As someone who is intimately knowledgeable about the who immigration marriage thing having just married a guy from overseas, the biggest issue is that that if they get married and he wants to be legal, he has to return to Ireland in order for that to happen. If they find out and he is here and they want to make it legal, he’ll have to go back to Ireland for 10 years before he can reapply to come in. It isn’t as easy as it was back in the day where you just get married and everything is hunky dory. There is literally no easy way to do this and the only way it could work would be if he goes back to Ireland and they work it out from there as though he wasn’t here illegally at all, from my understanding. The whole process is hard, they put your entire relationship under a microscope, and it sucks. So, hard pass from me.
Having watched my niece and her Israeli-born fiance go through this 17 years ago, even then this was a process of circus-sized hoops and rigor. Interviews, interviews, interviews, pictures, correspondence, history, family members called to testify. Every time they turned around, yet more paper and questions and anxiety.
I got into an argument with a woman at book club (she never came back) about how immigrants only had to pinkie-swear to get into this country. I told her she didn’t know WTF she was talking about. Hard pass on all of it.
I really appreciate this review of the book. I didn’t read the blurb very carefully so I didn’t catch the immigration aspect of it, and I’ve taken it off my TBR because… no thanks.
@Ren I’m sorry, but I find this a really insensitive comment. This was already an issue 2 years ago, so I don’t see your point about the lag in traditional publishing. Just because more white Americans became aware of the issues surrounding immigration reform, especially with regards to undocumented immigrants who are by and large people of color, doesn’t mean this book would have been less problematic. Not everyone has the luxury of wearing those blinders you speak of.
Thank you, Carrie S. I have so many undocumented friends of color who are suffering because of immigration. They are good, upstanding people who just want a better life for their children. It’s good to know they aren’t alone.
I think immigration has always been an issue, it’s not a new thing, the current administration just made it even worse. The biggest shift in attitude was 9/11 and that happened two decades ago!
I am an immigrant and so is my husband, but we’re white, educated and European, so as privileged as can be, and even we are feeling insecure. I can imagine how awful DREAMERs must feel. It took us 13 years to get a green card (after we got our Ph.D.s in the US) and we had my husband’s employers lawyers on our side. Did you know green cards can be revoked for misdemeanors such as driving tickets and other stuff? Who cares, immigrants can’t vote. Yes, we pay taxes and social security (we don’t qualify for). And that disgusting “chain immigration” stuff that the White House (!) tweets which looks like straight from an NS publication in the 1930s.
I think green card romances should be treated as historicals, let them take place before 2001.
omg YES. I loved the characters but the WHOLE time I was just thinking “this is only working because they’re white, this is only working because they’re white”. And not only has he been in the country illegally for four years, but they also LIE to the immigration officer and they’re STILL looked at like “oh these crazy kids”. Omg I just can’t
I know someone who was undocumented for a while as a child, who subsequently gained citizenship through an amnesty. Her AMERICAN PASSPORT still had an automatic code that tripped an extra security check when she returned from studying abroad as a college student. Never mind green cards: CITIZENSHIP still didn’t prevent headaches. (In fairness, after a few hours and staring at the computer they let her through, but it freaked her out.)
I should add that this doesn’t seem so much like “fantasy New York” as “unresearched New York” because I also have serious issues with the “he’s a busker who gets his big break in a Broadway show.” Ummm…no. I know several people who are free lance musicians in New York. A broadway chair is the near impossible dream of thousands of people. You start out by getting on a sub list and subbing for a while in as many shows as possible. You try to play Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway. You play clubs and concerts (and yes, things like weddings and busking). A fair number of those gigs involve 1099s and I-9 forms (certainly off broadway or as a broadway sub), so you’d ALREADY need a social security number. And if you’re good enough to beat out the competition in a blind audition, you can get your employer to sponsor you as an “alien of extraordinary ability” which is a LOT better visa because it allows you to work. Though there would still be a touchback clause, I think.
Immigration is a bitch in most of the developed world. Watching xenophobia and institutionalized racism play out by ruining people’s lives is NOT romantic. Can we retire the ALWAYS inaccurate “married to stay in the country” plot, please?
Can any immigrants or spouses of immigrants commenting here recommend a site or two that would lay out the facts of the immigration process?
I’ve written a novella featuring a couple (she is Mexican-American, he is Italian) who meet in L.A. (he is here on a work visa) marry in Italy, and then come back to L.A. to live. Would like to fact-check this before I do the rewrite that is scheduled for this year. I did research the issues before writing the thing, but failed to find the equivalent of a FAQs page!
Since it’s a novella, the immigration issue is not given a lot of space, but I would like to make sure I haven’t put anything in that is flat-out false.
chacha1: I recommend googling specific issues and reading immigration forums. the official UCSIS sites might be useful, too. I got married abroad (EU), and I had to get a translated copy of the certificate. The process of marrying an American is a bit more elaborate, and the spouse only gets a temporary Greencard and there are still interviews. Just make clear the foreign spouse has a legal immigration record, traveling while waiting for the Greencard also needs special paperwork – you can’t just leave the US.
Also: Having lived in NYC, I thought the plot was that the “roomies” need to live together because they couldn’t afford the rent otherwise (especially as struggling musicians), no green card plot necessary.
@Rebecca: To clarify the Broadway plot element that I don’t think was touched on in the review – Holland’s uncle is a huge Broadway producer. Calvin saves Holland from being pushed onto some subway tracks and to thank him, she gets him an audition with her uncle. I believe they’re looking for a replacement musician for the show.
I had the same struggles! I really enjoyed reading it but at the same time, the current climate and actual reality of immigration law kept tripping me up. But I will say, Calvin is the dreamiest and I loved him and Holland together.
@ Mona, thanks!
Preach, it sister. Shout it from the rooftops. This country is doing despicable things to immigrants. We are in the Christmas season, the Holy Family were immigrants. The Magnificat addresses social justice.
One point about this book… I don’t think it works anymore for a US citizen to marry an immigrant so that person can stay in the USA. All sorts of immigrants, some here for decades, married to citizens are being deported. I think the entire premise to the book may be flawed.
This novel sounds spectacularly tone-deaf.
I tend to have a difficult time with contemporary romances, because I find the necessary suspension of disbelief much easier to achieve in an alien world or historical time period. Contemporary romance works best for me either in the exaggerated reality of action/suspense or super-saccharine small-town cozy bubbles.
Romances like this, which purport to be about fairly regular people in a fairly regular setting (New York glitter notwithstanding), are trickier to accomplish, partly because those issues of class and race and color cannot be so easily waved away. Presenting the very real and fraught issue of immigration as a cute-white-people-problem may not be wrong in and of itself, but it’s absolutely wrong in this cultural time period.
With great power comes great responsibility, and any author of any caliber wields a certain amount of power–words have meaning and meaning has influence, and once the book has left your laptop you have no control over who will read it or what her reaction will be. The responsibility is not to make sure the reader likes it–or even make sure it’s good–but to make sure it’s thoughtful. This was not thoughtful; this was tunnel vision of the destructive kind.
@Rose wrote, “I tend to have a difficult time with contemporary romances, because I find the necessary suspension of disbelief much easier to achieve in an alien world or historical time period. ”
I can’t suspend belief in an historical time period because by academic training I am an historian and research is easy enough to do.
Something I have observed is that it seems to me that too many authors don’t question popular belief and just promulgate falsehoods.
Oops… there I go off once againonto a rant about the appearance of verisimilitude. Well, I’ll shut up now
@Amanda – Thanks, but it still sounds more like an old Katharine Hepburn movie version of Broadway producers than real life. My understanding is that every contracted member of an orchestra is responsible for finding their own subs (replacement musicians). Each member submits a “sub list” to the conductor, with up to five names on it, so if they call in sick, or break their leg, or go into labor, or whatever, the conductor can call someone as a last minute replacement. Being a “sub” is a highly desirable job for a free-lancer too, because the Broadway shows pay well and (as I said) it’s a resume builder. If the show has already opened (and even if it hasn’t), I’m not sure a producer would have anything to do with hiring the musicians. The New York chapter of the musicians union, local 802, has a web page, “How do I get a gig on Broadway?” that lays all of this out. And I’ll say again: union job. As in, job with health insurance and employer contributions to social security and pension funds for which you must have a social security number. If Holland’s uncle threatens to pull the money out of the show (and if it’s a big hit, he’d be losing his own investment then) to MAKE Calvin a sub instead of one of the standard ones, he’s a jerk who’s depriving five musicians of a rightful gig, and he might well also be courting a strike or action from the union. (And musicians strikes are bad for hit shows, because they WILL picket outside the theater, which is not the publicity anyone wants.) But even if he’s willing to do all of that, unless Calvin has a social security number already, the job is impossible for the same reasons most professional work is impossible for people who are undocumented.
@Gloriamarie – YES!!!! To both of your comments, especially the not questioning popular beliefs. I can make allowances for books published before the 1990s, pre-internet, by authors who did not have access to research libraries because of their location, and repeated things in the books that were available to them or from memory. But now…
@Gloriamarie I certainly didn’t mean to disparage historical romances or historians!! I agree that research is easy enough to do and should be a requirement for good historical fiction–but from my point of view as a fairly uneducated reader, I can more easily slip into a state of suspended belief in a world with which I am unfamiliar.
Please keep researching and helping writers achieve verisimilitude (and not just the appearance thereof! ;))
@Rose wrote, “I certainly didn’t mean to disparage historical romances or historians!! ”
I didn’t take it that way! Although I gotta say, in this particular novel, I know nothing about Broadway and how that works except what I saw on that TV show about a musical about the life of Marilyn Monroe.
@Rebecca wrote, ” YES!!!! To both of your comments, especially the not questioning popular beliefs.” Thank you.
I am still reeling from a book I read in the 1980s, I think, where the author has a 1950 era heroine strolling through JFK airport. Someone should have caught that.
@chacha1 nolo.org has good, simple explanations of immigration processes. If they are getting married abroad it would be a consular process through a spousal petition.
I am an immigration lawyer and I cannot read books with immigration as the main plot device. All I can do is think of how many ways a fake marriage can go wrong and usually how wrong authors get the process. And somewhat irrationally, I blame how common this trope can be with why immigration officials are overly suspicious of marriage applications in the first place. It definitely isn’t the escapism I enjoy when I’m reading.
@Rebecca: Oh, the book does take some significant suspension of disbelief, despite some form of nepotism being rather believable for being getting ahead in this day and age. But overall, I still enjoyed the book and had a different reading experience than Carrie. Though I wouldn’t say this one is my favorite by Christina Lauren.
I always think it’s interesting when two (or more) of us read the same book at SBTB HQ and have different thoughts.
@Gloriamarie – wowsers. A book published in the 1980s could barely have been WRITTEN by someone born after the 1960s and quite possibly before that. That’s not historical research, it’s just logic and living memory. (Was it called “future assassinated president JFK airport”?) I meant more stuff like “no one in the middle ages ever took a bath” which are the kind of widespread myths that get into a lot of general nonfiction even, as well as fiction, and sans internet could be hard to verify. Here’s to living long enough to read a “historical” romance set in the 1980s where the shoulder pad and legwarmer wearing heroine wanders around downtown NY in the shadow of the “Freedom Tower.” 😀
@Rebecca, Thank you for sharing my feelings in that book.
I surely do wish I could remember the author/title because I’d be interested to know if she was more careful in the future.
At the time I had a friend who worked in the COntracts department for Houghton-Mifflin and he said one of the ways to account for such an egregious error is lack of an editor. He told me that the even the big publishing companies were no longer hiring editors who shaped and molded their clients. Authors had to hire their own editors.
Now in these days of self-publishing, some authors are more responsible not only to their reader but to their own creativity and do hire editors but I fear too many do not.
It’s subject on which I can was quite elogquentlt. Not to mention, verbosely.
This book seems like a missed opportunity. Wouldn’t it be amazing to read a romance that sensitively and honestly examines what a mixed citizen-immigrant (and they’re not from Europe or Canada) relationship would look like today? Sort of like “Never Forever” in book form, updated for the Trump era.
Do those books exist in Romancelandia? Maybe it’s just me, but I would read the hell out of a romance like that.
I know romances are supposed to be escapist blah blah don’t want to offend Emperor Orange supporters or ICE agents or something, but I’ve been legitimately frustrated by the lack of effing *realness* in romances I’ve been reading lately.
IDK. I used to use romance to help me process complicated emotions I was having, but I can’t seem to find the newer books that deal with things like overwhelming grief, female rage, crippling fear and total helplessness… In any book, really.
Thank you, Carrie! Spot on comments.
I’m a naturalized US citizen based on my marriage to an American, and we were definitely conscious, 10 years ago, of how easy and quick the immigration process was for us compared to a lot of other people — because I’m white/European/highly educated. It was still a ton of paperwork (and money, in itself a big hurdle for a lot of people), but all of our applications went through promptly with no extra scrutiny. Meanwhile, applicants from other countries were subject to additional wait times, more intrusive questioning, etc. I imagine that disparity to be even greater today than a decade ago.
I agree 100% with your rant, I’m just here to rant some more. The current demonization of so-called “chain” migration(a term made up to make it sound bad), and the green card lottery is maddening. Ignorant people think the green card lottery means you can just walk into the U.S. No, it doesn’t work like that. A relative of my husband’s recently “won” the green card lottery, but because she is from Yemen she can’t make use of it, because of the g-d- travel ban. Heartbreaking when you consider the suffering going on now in Yemen because of the war there.
If you want to get an idea of how the green card lottery works, I really recommend listening to the podcast This American Life did a few years ago, called Abdi and the Golden Ticket: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/560/abdi-and-the-golden-ticket
Really appreciated this rant! Had the same experience reading the book – kept asking myself: why is this guy Irish? Is it because they are trying really hard to avoid stereotypes of the “illegal immigrant”? Or is it simply – as you suggest – that nobody would really buy such an easy process for a person of color?
I really enjoyed the recent Christina Lauren YA m/m romance that featured a young gay Mormon coming of age and coming out (Autoboyography) – it made me think about the way identities overlap and contradict one another and change as we grow. I can understand that not all romances can do that – but this one pushed all my buttons with the political stuff. I know that there are lots of land mines for white authors to navigate in writing a more diverse* and more deeply engaged book, but I was disappointed and frustrated by that.
*Yes, even though I read this right when it came out, I remember that her uncles are gay and one is African. I guess I mean I’m looking for more diverse leading men and ladies…. in ALL the romances I read, since the world I live in has romantic heroes and heroines from all kinds of backgrounds.
Anyway, thanks for this piece!
YES. THIS. I held off on reading your review until I had finished the book because I have kind of a thing about that–I never want someone else’s opinion to inform my own even in a subtle way. But although I enjoyed reading this book very much, I had a lot of similar thoughts. If this story were about brown people this would all be going down much differently….
When they tell them near the end that they don’t even have to be married because now dude is a big Broadway star so they can for sure get him a visa, I just felt disgusted. Like, really? We are turning away children from bombed-out cities and families that want to work hard and make a better life but oh please, if you are a big Broadway star by whom rich people and celebrities enjoy being entertained, then come on in! Gross. I did have one more problem with the book which related to the heroine’s best friend. This author is one of my favorites and I have always enjoyed the strong female friendships that they write. However this time the heroine’s only strong friend relationship ended up devolving into the kind of stereotypical “other women are bitches” BS that shows up in more dated romances. And yet STILL with all that I managed to truly enjoy the development of the relationship between the two main characters and find this a fun, sexy, comforting book. Which tells you that it had great potential to be even more awesome if these issues were fixed.
As someone who’s read Lauren’s next book, let me assure you all – it just gets worse from here.