Book Review: A Novel Love Story

Are you an Ashley Poston fan? I love her books. I haven’t read any of her YA work, but when I read her adult debut, The Dead Romantics, two years ago, I immediately loved the book. Then, I read her next book The Seven Year Slip earlier this year and was obsessed. I just finished her latest book, A Novel Love Story, and it should come as no surprise that I loved it too!

I will say, though, that this book took me longer to fall in love with compared to the previous two, but that last 25% or so of the book really hit me and captured my heart.

The novel follows Eileen “Elsy” Merriweather and Anders Sinclair. Elsy is a English professor outside Atlanta, Georgia, and has been going through a tough time the past couple years after her fiancé broke up with her. One of the things that has kept her going the past two years is her virtual book club with her best friend and a few other long distance friends. They all came together due to their love for a romantic book series by the late Rachel Flowers. For the past few years they have all spent a week together in a cabin in the Hudson Valley to hang out together and talk books. But this year, no one can make it to the cabin. Elsy decides to still go on her own, because she desperately needs this trip even if she’ll be alone.

Elsy embarks on the road trip alone and when she starts to get close to the cabin she gets caught in a rain storm and her car breaks down. She ends up in a small town and everything seems familiar. It doesn’t take her long to realize it seems familiar because she has entered into Eloraton – the fictional town from her favorite book series. All of her favorite characters are there – but they have no idea they are in a book. They are all stuck in their stories and can’t seem to move forward with their happy endings, because the author passed away suddenly in an accident before she could finish the last book in the series. Elsy wants to help them, but also not mess any of their stories up. As she navigates her time in Eloraton, she also grows close to Anders – the grumpy bookstore owner – who mysteriously was not in the books. Who is Anders and why does he seem familiar?

I loved this book so much. As mentioned above, it did take me longer to fall in love with this book compared to the other Ashley Poston books I’ve read in the past, but once I did, it really stuck with me. For most of the book I thought to myself that I really liked the book but that special thing that would make me love it hadn’t happened yet. And then it did around the 75% mark and it became very special to me and had me in tears. Ashley Poston definitely has a way of creating these emotional stories full of love and that make your heart ache. I loved Elsy and Anders and what Eloraton meant to them and the way the town and the stories helped them both heal.

All three of her adult novels are paranormal romance and tie in grief in some way that will make you sad, but also feel hopeful. And the endings are HEA if you are wondering, because I know if her books were new to me I’d refuse to read them if they weren’t going to be happy endings!

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