Friendships may be the most significant relationships in our lives, formed with people we can rely on, laugh with, and weather hardship alongside. They’re often the most longstanding relationships too, often forming in college, high school, sometimes even early childhood. They require all the same commitments; to be vulnerable, to show up through the good and bad. A platonic relationship can be, as Jessica George argues in her sophomore novel, more intimate than a romantic one. So why is it then, that they’re often treated as secondary? In Love by the Book, George gives them their due.
Remy leads this refreshing story about platonic love. A novelist with a bestselling debut inspired by her own group of friends, she’s currently at work on her second book. Or rather, that’s what she’s supposed to be doing. Inspiration has vanished however, and the pressure from her agent to send her something new isn’t helping. Normally, she’d lean on her friends. But Lin’s job has taken her across the Atlantic, Melissa is pregnant, and Nova’s way of handling all this change is to go back to a no-good boyfriend. For the first time in her adult life, Remy is alone in London, no girlfriends or creative ideas in sight. That is, until she bumps into an old schoolmate at a cozy book event. Simone is the opposite of Remy. Composed and self-assured, a schoolteacher with a secret side hustle that, Simone worries, has irreparably damaged her relationship with her close-knit family. Remy and Simone are opposites in more ways than one, but they’ll find that that doesn’t mean they’re not exactly what each other needs.
Love by the Book is a different kind of romcom but one we need. George offers a heartwarming and delightfully refreshing take on contemporary friendships, how difficult they can be to maintain as we get older – let alone start as an adult – but how necessary they are.
