A Novel Love Story

Eileen “Elsy” Merriweather, an English professor and prolific reader of romance novels who feels like her life is at a standstill, gets lost on the road on her way to Rhinebeck, New York. She is attempting to get to an annual book club retreat when she and her 1979 Ford Pinto named Sweetpea are caught in a rainstorm. She is left without cellphone service. Elsy looks forward to the annual retreat of the “Super Smutty Book Club” because it provides a break from her stagnant life. In the club, she and her friends can drink wine, read romance novels, and talk about how much they love books. However, this year, everyone else in the book club couldn’t go, including Elsy’s best friend, Prudence (“Pru”). Elsy is most devastated about Pru’s absence, but she feels like she can’t tell her because her boyfriend booked them a last-minute trip to Iceland, where Elsy is sure that he will propose. Elsy is convinced that she needs this retreat more than anything, so she is determined to go on her own.

On the way to the cabin, she listens to the audiobook of Daffodil Daydreams, the first in a series of romance novels by Elsy’s favorite author, Rachel Flowers. Elsy can quote all the Quixotic Falls series by heart, and she was heartbroken when Rachel died when she and her fiancé were hit by a drunk driver a few years prior, leaving the last book in the series unfinished. Elsy thinks about how important love stories are to her, especially after she experienced her own broken engagement years ago, from which she has barely been able to recover.

Without the help of Google Maps, Elsy decides to keep driving, hoping that she will come upon a town where she can get help. She turns off the road onto a smaller one with a covered bridge and finally comes upon a small town with a clock tower. She knocks her phone off the dashboard, accidentally turning the radio on as it is playing her least favorite song, “Come On, Eileen.” This distracts Elsy for a moment in the storm, and suddenly her car is right in front of a man standing in the middle of the street. She abruptly swerves into a parking spot, and her car dies with a clunk.

Elsy rushes out of her car to get to the man, who is now sitting in the middle of the road but is otherwise unharmed. He berates her for almost hitting him, though Elsy does mention that he was just standing in the middle of the road. As the man sulks away, Elsy spots a bar and determines to get dinner and directions inside. She texts her book club’s group chat, but her message doesn’t go through because the town has no cell service. Inside, a bartender named Gail gets Elsy a burger that is hard as a rock and tells her that the only hotel nearby is under renovation. However, Gail has an idea as she sees someone come inside, but the person turns out to be the man Elsy almost hit with her car. Gail asks the man, Anderson “Anders” Sinclair, if he still has a guest room available at his place, but Elsy knows that she cannot accept this plan, especially after she nearly killed him. Even so, Anders offers his guest room for the night as long as Elsy doesn’t mind the starling birds that nest in the eaves of the building. Elsy finds it ironic that his house has starlings, as both she and Pru have starling tattoos as a reference to their favorite romance series.

After tentatively agreeing to stay with the stranger she nearly killed, Elsy gets some things from her car, where Anders spots her signed copies of the Quixotic Falls series. Anders takes Elsy to his guest room, which is actually inside the bookstore he owns. Elsy is amazed by the bookstore and the room within it, but Anders refuses to take payment for it when she offers. The two of them bicker but realize that they have a bit in common, and Elsy thinks that, if her life were a romance novel, she would kiss Anders at this moment.

Elsy awakens to the sound of the starlings singing a familiar tune that she can’t put her finger on. She thinks about the times she and Pru argued about the symbolism of the starlings in the Quixotic Falls novels, as Pru always thought that they would come to mean something important by the final book. When she thinks of Pru, Elsy is hurt that she couldn’t come to the retreat but is also terrified of their friendship falling apart as Pru’s life begins to change. When Elsy goes downstairs, she hears Anders talking to a little girl about repairing her well-loved favorite book. Elsy thinks back to how her mother, a librarian, would always help her repair her favorite books that had fallen apart from too much reading.

Anders gives Elsy a map to get out of town, as the storm the previous night knocked out the internet. Elsy notices that a bridge she has to go over has the same name as one in Eloraton, the setting of the Quixotic Falls novels. When she begins to quote the first novel to Anders, he seems to be shocked, but Elsy assumes that it’s just because she memorized the first line of her favorite book. When she gets to Sweetpea, she confirms that her car has died, and she goes into a nearby flower shop to ask for help. The woman who owns the shop is named Lyssa, and she knows from small-town gossip that Elsy stayed with Anders last night. Elsy notices that Lyssa looks familiar just before the radio in the shop mentions the name “Eloraton” and starts to play “Come On, Eileen.”

Elsy doesn’t know what to think as she leaves the shop and continues to recognize things, thinking that someone is playing a joke on her. She can’t make herself believe that she is actually in Eloraton, the setting of her favorite book series, until it begins to rain at exactly noon, something that happens every day in the Quixotic Falls series. Just as it starts to rain, Elsy feels someone open an umbrella over her and sees Anders. He tells her that every day is the same here and begins to describe the happenings of Rachel Flowers’s novels, confirming that Elsy is actually in the fictional town of Eloraton.

Elsy remembers picking up Daffodil Daydreams, the first of Rachel Flowers’s novels, when it had just come out, thinking that it would be like any other book. The book changed Elsy’s life and made her fall in love with reading again. Four years later, Pru came to her to tell her about a romance book club that was being started online with some other fans of Rachel’s books. Elsy was hesitant about meeting the people of the book club, but she was immediately hooked when she met Janelle, Aditi, Matt, Olivia, and Benji, who are all equally big fans of the Quixotic Falls series. Elsy didn’t realize how much she had longed for a community before meeting this group, and two years later, they planned to all meet in person. However, their first book club retreat was planned during what Elsy calls “the Year [She] Want[s] to Forget” (56). It is later revealed that this was the year in which her ex-fiancé, Liam Black, broke off their engagement and the year that Rachel died. Pru forced Elsy into the car, where they drove from their home in Georgia to New York, and Elsy had a great time with the book club. Elsy reflects on how everything works out for Pru and how, unlike herself, Pru lives like the main character of her own story.

Elsy continues to doubt that she is in Eloraton, thinking she must have died on the side of the road in the rainstorm. Anders takes her to the local cafe, where Elsy sees only a few words on the menu. Anders tells her that the rest of the menu wasn’t imagined and that there are several blanks in the town that Rachel Flowers didn’t write the details on. Anders doesn’t know how Elsy found the town, yet Elsy does not recognize Anders, even with her encyclopedic knowledge of the series. Anders tells Elsy that after lunch, she needs to leave, not knowing that her car is dead. A waitress comes over to take their order, and Elsy recognizes her as Ruby, the protagonist of Unrequited Love Song, the second novel in the Quixotic Falls series.

Elsy thinks about how well she knows Ruby, despite just meeting her, and Anders tries to get her to act normal around the fictional characters. Elsy considers the ending of Unrequited Love Song and how it is divisive among fans because Ruby chose to be with her boyfriend, Jake, rather than follow her dream of becoming a pop star. Elsy wonders if Ruby is happy now, and Anders says, “The worst thing that can happen here is a burnt hamburger and a rainy afternoon. How can she not be?” (65). Later, when she runs into Ruby outside the bathroom, Elsy tells her that she can still go after her dreams, but Ruby is offended, thinking that Elsy doesn’t know anything about her. Anders can tell that Elsy said something when Ruby slams their food down on the table, and Elsy admits what happened. Anders tells her that, aside from the two of them, no one knows that they’re in a book, so Elsy can’t tell the characters things like that.

Elsy plans to tell Anders about her car before she spots the local candy shop, Sweeties, and the character Maya Shah working at the counter. Elsy buys plenty of candy as she bonds with Maya, but Anders refuses to have any because he doesn’t like anything sweet. Elsy asks Anders who he is, as she can’t remember the owner of Ineffable Books in the novels, but Anders just lets her guess. Elsy is determined to see the rest of the town, particularly the namesake waterfall of the series, which is rumored to be magical. Anders, however, insists that she leave Eloraton, telling her that the waterfall won’t bring back whoever hurt her and made her so lonely and desperate. Elsy suddenly slaps him because his comment hit too close to home, and she is just as surprised that she did so as Anders is. She apologizes briefly as she runs away, thinking about her ex-fiancé, Liam.

Elsy describes falling in love with Liam when she was 26 and at a New Year’s Eve party that Pru had dragged her to. Wanting to feel as confident and empowered as Pru, Elsy kissed one of the party’s bartenders at midnight, who turned out to be Liam. Elsy fell for Liam hard and fast and let her life be absorbed into his, despite their many differences. Pru warned Elsy early on not to lose herself in the relationship, but looking back, Elsy knows that that is exactly what she did. Liam proposed on a hike he wanted to go on, and Elsy accepted, but a week before the wedding, he asked her if she actually wanted to go through with it, knowing that he was making all the decisions. Liam felt like he didn’t actually know Elsy or what she wanted and told her that he met someone else, who he became engaged to a few months later.

Elsy sunk into reading books and falling in love with fictional stories, but later that year, Rachel Flowers died, devastating her even more. For two years, the book club and their annual retreats helped cure some of Elsy’s despair, but this year, everyone pulled out, leaving Elsy to go on the retreat on her own. She initially thought she wouldn’t go, but then she saw pictures of Liam’s wedding on social media and knew that she needed a change. Pru caught her as she was leaving and asked Elsy if she was seriously going to the book club cabin on her own, and the two fought about how Elsy hadn’t done anything for herself in the three years since Liam left her. Like Liam, Pru had asked what Elsy actually wanted, but she couldn’t admit that she wanted to grow and change but was too scared to try. Elsy felt like she needed to get away more than anything else, and that is why she wanted to stay in Eloraton and get lost there.