Eileen Merriweather knows a thing or two about romance.
As a professor of literature, she teaches prestigious courses on history’s greatest romantics, but one week out of the year she abandons her dusty textbooks and makes a pilgrimage to the Hudson Valley with her best friend Pru to meet their Super Smutty Book Club in person, and celebrate the romance series that brought them together—Quixotic Falls. It’s a week of wine and happily-ever-afters.
Or it’s supposed to be.
Pru bails at the last minute, and Elsy winds up lost in Hudson Valley—alone. In a thunderstorm. When she takes shelter in a bookstore, she immediately gets on the bad side of its grumpy (and infuriatingly sexy) owner, and finds herself in a quaint town that feels like it’s right out of a book…
Because it is.
Eloraton can’t be real, and yet… she’s here. The town is everything she imagined from her favorite series, where the candy store’s honey taffy is always sweet, and the local bar’s burgers are always a little burnt, and rain always comes in the afternoon. It’s perfect. A place built on meet-cutes and storybook endings.
Except, there’s something off in Eloraton. Because nothing changes, nothing moves, trapped in the last place the late author of Quixotic Falls left them. Which must be why Elsy is to find an ending to this last story, the one the author never finished.
The only problem? The bookstore owner never wants the story to end, and he might be the one person who can help her imagine this final happily-ever-after.
And maybe find one for herself.
- Title: A Novel Love Story
- Author: Ashley Poston
- Publisher: Berkley
- Publication Date: June 25, 2024
- Genre: Contemporary Romance
- Targeted Age Range: Adult
- Content Warnings: grief, death, loss of a spouse
- Rating: ★★★.5
Ashley Poston’s The Seven Year Slip was one of my favorite reads last year, so you can only imagine how excited I was for A Novel Love Story — a story revolving around a fictional literary town come to life. Every year, Eileen looks forward to escaping her life and running away with her romance book club — which is why when the rest of the book club is unable to make it this year for one reason or another, she decides to embark on the trip by herself. Accompanied with a box of her most beloved books, a bottle of wine, and her overnight bag, she’s woefully unprepared when her car breaks down right outside of a small town that feels eerily familiar to Eloraton, the town in which her favorite romance series is set. And the town’s residents? The characters from that very same series, living out the same plotlines and frequenting the same haunts — bar one. The only exception is the town’s grumpy bookseller, Anders, who doesn’t seem to be a character from the books, and also is the only other person aware of, well, everything.
In a way, A Novel Love Story reminds me of Schmigadoon (or Brigadoon, if you’re familiar with the movie/musical), meets a town like Gilmore Girls’ Stars Hollow, with the characters in Once Upon a Time. And I adored it. The world that Poston has crafted is utterly charming; no wonder Eileen was so entranced by the town of Eloraton. And like all stories that involve a book within a book, Poston has to keep the reader invested in both stories, while also making sure that the reader isn’t overly invested in the other story. I personally think that Poston does a decent job of keeping the reader invested in the characters and plot line of Quixatic Falls without overshadowing the events of A Novel Love Story.
The townspeople of Eloraton were definitely a highlight for me, but I also just loved reading about how they interacted with Eileen, and more so, Anders. Anders was such a lovely contrast to Eileen, and I found myself more invested in his storyline and how he fit into the world of Eloraton at times, over Eileen’s character arc. While I loved the concept of A Novel Love Story, and found the love story between Anders and Eileen incredibly endearing, I felt quite disconnected from our protagonist, Eileen. By now, I’m used to associating Ashley Poston’s novels with themes of grief and self-discovery, but also found myself frustrated with the lack of growth for Eileen. I think the story got a little repetitive at times, and I just struggled to feel fully invested in A Novel Love Story.
Overall, I would still recommend A Novel Love Story — it wasn’t my perfect story, but I did still find my visit to Eloraton delightful, and hope that others can connect to this delightful world better than I could.
Links for A Novel Love Story: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop
Ashley Poston is the New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of The Dead Romantics, The Seven Year Slip, and the forthcoming A Novel Love Story. She has also written over half a dozen young adult novels.
After graduating from the University of South Carolina with a BA in English, she pursued a marketing design career in the publishing industry before deciding to write full-time. She bides her time between South Carolina and New York, and all the bookstores between.
