I read Truly shortly after it was published, and I wanted to share the love as soon as I finished it. Problem was I had such a BIG love for this book that I wasn’t sure I could do it justice. So much wonderfulness intimidated the hell out of me. If I’m honest, I have to say that Ruthie Knox hasn’t written anything that I haven’t enjoyed. Truly, however, includes all the elements that I love most about her work. Given time and distance, I’m not quite so awash in squee, but I really can’t say enough about the juicy goodness of this book.

Truly opens as May, homeless and broke on the bitter streets of New York City, is checking out the habitués of a cheesehead bar hoping to find a little help in her current predicament. She may be willing to depend on the kindness of strangers, but only if they’re from Wisconsin. Having stabbed her pro football player boyfriend with a shrimp fork in response to the clunkiest, most insulting marriage proposal in the history of charity fundraisers, May finds herself—thanks to YouTube—not only embarrassed but instantly infamous. Wanting only to go home, May breaks up with Dan, the football player, via note, walks out of his apartment, and is promptly and politely mugged. Her situation is not totally desperate, but she is not ready to sacrifice her last crumbs of pride either. She accosts a cranky looking guy in the aforementioned bar and hijinks ensue.

Mr. Cranky is Ben, a talented chef with anger management issues; he is also a self-confessed asshole. His fierce competitiveness and driven perfectionism destroyed his marriage/business partnership and messed up his ability to practice his craft. However, beneath the crankiness is the fundamental decency that imbues so many of Knox’s characters. Still, there’s a crap ton of assholery piled on top, and from the start, Ben’s most engaging traits are his honesty and self-awareness. He also has amazing x-ray goggles of perceptiveness when it comes to the real May.  These qualities more than any elusive heart of gold, cause him to offer grudging help to May and to gradually become more and more enthralled with her.

I really love May and Ben, individually and as a couple. May’s gutsiness combines with self-deprecating humor to make her an extremely engaging character, but ultimately, it is her overwhelming hopefulness that really grabs the reader. She is kind-hearted and generous to everyone except herself, but she is beginning to want more and to acknowledge her right to do so. She is a recovering pleaser fueled by quiet, completely understandable fury. Ben really is an asshole at times, both toward May and toward the other people in his life. However, it’s kind of refreshing to have a character berate himself for a real flaw. I get tired of heroes and heroines bemoaning some perceived imperfection that their significant other and often the rest of the world consider an attraction. (You know your tactless mouth or large butt probably aren’t really totes adorbs to all and sundry.) As for Ben, he actually works at controlling his anger and aggression, curbing his tongue and making sacrifices to put himself in a better place.  And sometimes he fails.

Even thinking about the divorce had his hackles up, made him bitter and far too sharp with her, and he hated that he’d made her wrap her arms around her waist in defense.

But even though he’d done that, her eyes didn’t reflect any of his blackest feelings back at him.  She just stood there, looking. Waiting for him to figure out what came next—as if he knew. As if he were capable of pulling out of this nose dive he’d put himself in.

Reflected back at himself in her wide, brown eyes, he wanted to be good enough.

As a couple May and Ben work because their strengths and weaknesses are complementary. They recognize kindred qualities in each other; Ben senses May’s stifled anger and her creative zing early in the relationship, and May finds Ben to be moody but solid enough to count on. She also finds that he too has his quirks, filling his time with substitute chef-ing and urban bee-keeping.

He was a farmer. In New York City. It figured, didn’t it? Only May would leave Wisconsin behind, move to New Jersey, stumble her way into a total life meltdown, and then pick a Wisconsin bee farmer to go home with.

While they are physically attracted to one another early and often, it isn’t really the motiveless insta-lust that mars many romances. Passion is a slow build, fueled by conversation as much as by yummy body parts, and the love scenes, when they come (yeah, I said it), are both hot and unconventional.  There is chemistry sans cliché.

And herein lies the first point of wonderfulness that defines this novel. Both May and Ben have reached a place where they know that their lives have to change. May has allowed herself to be defined as sort of mediocre all her life.  Her family, her friends, and her ex see her as a solid sturdy Midwestern stereotype and, worse, see that stereotype as her most positive quality. May has muted her own creativity and her willingness to take risks because of an image constructed by others. None of these people are cruel or abusive, just clueless.

When her boyfriend makes his attitude public in the most humiliating manner conceivable, May realizes that she wants and deserves more. Most of her subsequent actions proceed from this. For Ben, the end of his marriage and the divorce settlement that prevents him from opening a restaurant of his own have triggered a reassessment of his priorities and a concerted effort not to be an asshole. He too is a work in progress. Why is this wonderful? Both Ben and May have made major life changing decisions before they even meet. They are not broken; they are already starting to rebuild. Their lives may not be perfect, but they are learning to recognize and reach for happiness when they see it. One of the first clues to their compatibility is the ability of each to see the potential and actual best in the other. Love is not the penicillin for their moody booboos or the duct tape holding their angsty psyches together. Love–and the acknowledgement and acceptance of love–grows organically and is its own justification.

Further wonderfulness stems from the humor and tenderness of this book. Knox tells the story from a third person POV that alternates between the two protagonists with occasional input from May’s sister and mother. May’s observations are especially hilarious as are the exchanges between Mae and Ben. May, whose main goal is to rejoin her family at their annual retreat back in Wisconsin, allows herself to be persuaded to linger in cold, grubby New York, but so much more goes on beneath the surface of  these conversations.

“I think you’re not the kind of person who ordinarily forks quarterbacks, so they’re all going to want to know what happened, and you don’t feel like talking about it yet.”

She gave him a little smile. “You might be right.”

“I think you need a vacation.”

“I’m trying to take one. At the cabin.”

“Yeah, well, apparently New York has other ideas. New York thinks you need a vacation here, and it’s not letting you go until you give it a few more days to change your mind about it.”

May looked at her shoes, the smile still lingering. “If New York wants to woo me, it shouldn’t be such a dick.”

I am a sucker for snappy dialogue and witty protagonists. Contemporaries are probably my least favorite flavor of romance, and in fact, I read them mostly thanks to my first encounters with Ruthie Knox. More importantly, while her characters make mistakes and occasionally embarrass themselves, Knox rarely uses her authorly authority to grind her characters down with humiliation. We laugh with them, not at them, and that’s as it should be. Mae and Ben are strong and smart and funny and imperfect. They grow and blossom in the course of the story, but if the petals are less than symmetrical or the leaves have been nibbled by aphids, that’s o.k.

And, thus, cleverly, I have led us to the most wonderful wonderfulness of all: “Disgusting and amazing!”  Truly is a novel with a theme complex enough to generate a plethora of college English essays (minus the smexin’ perhaps) as well as several months of profound personal contemplation.  It’s not always explicit, but it is nonetheless ubiquitous.

That was life.  There were always so many of these awkward moments, these miscalculations between two people. There was beer breath and the occasional need for lube. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t magical.

Knox uses New York City, sex, ordinary life, urban bee-keeping, character, and, naturally, love to expand her exploration of two seemingly antithetical qualities.  Disgusting.  Amazing.  And every time she returns to these qualities from the action of the story, the point is reinforced without fakery or awkwardness.

“Yeah, it’s full of honey. You can tell by looking at it, the bees have capped off most of the cells. They do that when the honey’s ready. It starts out as nectar, right? Which is just sugary water. And then they reduce it down to a specific moisture level, around seventeen, eighteen percent, and cap it off.”

“How do they reduce it?”

“First they use their mouths. The forager bees will pass it along to other bees, who move it around their mouth parts to expose it to air. Then later they put it in the cells, and they beat air over them with their wings.”

“I can’t decide if that’s disgusting or amazing.”

Was that true? It certainly had the ring of truth. She thought of childbirth and sex. The taste of the ocean. The view of New York from the top of the Brooklyn Bridge.

 Disgusting and amazing.

 

I could blather on indefinitely about Truly. It has road trips. It has Wisconsin as well as New York. It has sex and food… sometimes together. It has an amazing cast of secondary characters. It has complicated, annoying, loving mother/daughter/sister relationships. It has a non-demonized ex. It has sequels for which I can’t wait, but which I can’t imagine surpassing Truly.

Over the years, the Bitchery has offered up suggestions for authors and books that should be offered to readers with a bias against romance.  As far as I’m concerned, Truly proves yet again that a romance novel can be the equal of the finest writing out there. Plotting, style, characterization, complexity, profundity—Knox has it all. The only formula here is quality. I reviewed one of Knox’s earlier novels for the RITA Readers Challenge last year, and concluded that her HEA was less about perfection than about hope. The same applies to Truly, only with bells on. Personally, my hope is that the future novels in the New York series are just as amazing as Truly, and that gazillions more readers soon share the pleasures of discovering Ruthie Knox.