Who Wrote the Book of Love?
- K.L. Romo
- January 26, 2023
In Amy Meyerson’s latest, an unsuspecting waitress did.
It’s almost Valentine’s Day, when love is in the air, mixed with the smell of roses, the taste of fancy chocolates, and the bubbles of champagne.
But what if you’re still searching for the perfect mate? If a love story could conjure the partner of your dreams, would you let it?
In bestselling author Amy Meyerson’s (The Bookshop of Yesterdays) new novel, The Love Scribe, a woman with no interest in romance for herself realizes she has the gift of shooting Cupid’s arrow on behalf of others.
Alice is not a writer; she’s a waitress. But when her best friend, Gabby, is dumped after five years and loses her confidence, something strange happens: An image of a hummingbird shedding a trail of hearts comes to Alice, and she writes it up as a story. The next thing Gabby knows, she’s found her soul mate.
Once Gabby shares Alice’s story with others, they, too, suddenly find their true loves. As news of Alice’s unexpected talent spreads, she’s inundated with requests for additional stories, which are really “more like fables, precisely calibrated to each of my clients’ needs. After they read them, they immediately meet the love of their life. The stories are theirs alone.”
Since each story is based on what ails a particular client, Alice must discern what that “ailment” is before she can get started on a fresh tale.
Alice knows she “had the power to help people in a way no one else could.” It’s magic — and for her, a feeling better than love. But when she’s summoned to a lonely recluse’s remote forest home, she discovers the gift of matchmaking can have unintended consequences. Playing God, after all, rarely ends well.
Ultimately, Alice learns that “stories are never just one thing. In love we find loss. Humor is so often laced with sadness. In lies you’ll see truth. In every ending, we can find a beginning.” And she realizes that she, too, deserves someone special in her life.
In this love letter to the written word, Meyerson shows us how our stories affect the people who read them — how they belong to the people who read them. Hopefully, those stories will provide the spark that turns into flames.
K.L. Romo writes about life on the fringe: Teetering dangerously on the edge is more interesting than standing safely in the middle. She is passionate about women’s issues and loves noisy clocks and fuzzy blankets but HATES the word normal. Find her on Twitter at @klromo and Instagram at @k.l.romo.
