Late one evening during our recent visit, Dan and I stayed up re-watching the classic movie Sleepless in Seattle starring Tom Hanks (architect, Sam Baldwin) and Meg Ryan (mystery woman, Annie). There is a scene in Sleepless in Seattle where Sam Baldwin's sister Suzy, recounts the closing climax of the movie An Affair to Remember to her brother and husband. (Memory jogger... An Affair to Remember is the 1957 movie where the lovers are to meet on Valentine's Day at the top of the Empire State Building in New York City.) Suzy is so overcome with emotion at recalling the poignant exchange between the star crossed lovers played by Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, that she can barely voice the story, sobbing, with tears streaming down her face. She laments that "Men just do not get this movie." Sam and her brother follow her recitation with a hilarious scene where they act out a hyperbole of her distressed, traumatized recitation, but instead substitute the closing action-packed battle of their favorite movie, The Dirty Dozen, a definite non-chick flick. Dan and I stayed up just to watch that memorable scene from Sleepless in Seattle.
Watching Sleepless in Seattle together was a mini-bonding time, that made me recall a previous complementary occasion of mom and son companionship. A few years ago, I'd briefly stayed with Dan when he lived at Newport Beach and had an outpatient medical procedure done. While he recuperated post surgery, I kept him company watching three DVDs in a row that starred Bruce Willis. Die Hard, Die Hard 2, and Die Hard with a Vengeance were Dan's DVD marathon choices –not mine! In one of the movies, barefooted Bruce Willis is running about a tall office building with shards of glass strewn about the floor from windows shattered by gun fire. Women just do not get those movies.
Back to the novel that women will get:
The Last Letter from Your Lover opens as the heroine – married, wealthy, beautiful, charming socialite Jennifer Stirling – is arousing from a coma as a result of an automobile accident. She has trauma induced amnesia. Yes, it is a cliché writing mechanism, but just go with it for now. She does not recall her home, friends, or husband and then stumbles upon a letter that reveals she had a lover, also, who she does not remember, either.
Characters, as in most of Jojo Moyes books. are well developed. There is Laurence, Jennifer's financially successful and business savvy husband who generously bestows on her the clothes, jewels, and other accoutrements befitting a trophy wife, but who only tolerates her, crediting her with minimal intelligence and awarding her little respect. There is the mysterious "B" whose handwriting and signature appear on the various love letters Jennifer finds she'd squirreled away amongst her private possessions. There is Anthony O'Hare, a rough and tough investigative journalist renown for his war zone experience covering stories in the turbulent Congo. His character brought to the book the ambience of the black and white movie Casablanca.
The novel is set in two time frames – the 1960's and forty-plus years later in the early 2000's. In the latter part of the novel, fast forward to the main characters Ellie, a feature writer on a newspaper and Rory, an intern who works in the bowels of the newspaper's extensive basement library. Ellie is not married like Jennifer – but John, her lover, is. Within the library's files are discovered two love letters that "B" wrote to Jennifer. Ellie, no doubt influenced by her own situation, becomes obsessed with learning if "B" and Jennifer's story had a happy ending, and so her relentless research begins.
Pardon my sexist, but pragmatic, view that men will just not get as excited about the romantic novel The Last Letter from Your Lover as women. It is An Affair to Remember entwined with Casablanca. What is universally appealing though, is that this novel had several plot twists and revelations that surprised me. I enjoy when a book is able to do that in such a way that "I don't see it coming."
The Last Letter from Your Lover opens as the heroine – married, wealthy, beautiful, charming socialite Jennifer Stirling – is arousing from a coma as a result of an automobile accident. She has trauma induced amnesia. Yes, it is a cliché writing mechanism, but just go with it for now. She does not recall her home, friends, or husband and then stumbles upon a letter that reveals she had a lover, also, who she does not remember, either.
Characters, as in most of Jojo Moyes books. are well developed. There is Laurence, Jennifer's financially successful and business savvy husband who generously bestows on her the clothes, jewels, and other accoutrements befitting a trophy wife, but who only tolerates her, crediting her with minimal intelligence and awarding her little respect. There is the mysterious "B" whose handwriting and signature appear on the various love letters Jennifer finds she'd squirreled away amongst her private possessions. There is Anthony O'Hare, a rough and tough investigative journalist renown for his war zone experience covering stories in the turbulent Congo. His character brought to the book the ambience of the black and white movie Casablanca.
The novel is set in two time frames – the 1960's and forty-plus years later in the early 2000's. In the latter part of the novel, fast forward to the main characters Ellie, a feature writer on a newspaper and Rory, an intern who works in the bowels of the newspaper's extensive basement library. Ellie is not married like Jennifer – but John, her lover, is. Within the library's files are discovered two love letters that "B" wrote to Jennifer. Ellie, no doubt influenced by her own situation, becomes obsessed with learning if "B" and Jennifer's story had a happy ending, and so her relentless research begins.
Pardon my sexist, but pragmatic, view that men will just not get as excited about the romantic novel The Last Letter from Your Lover as women. It is An Affair to Remember entwined with Casablanca. What is universally appealing though, is that this novel had several plot twists and revelations that surprised me. I enjoy when a book is able to do that in such a way that "I don't see it coming."
The Last Letter from Your Lover is the fourth work I have read by Jojo Moyes. I believe that this author improves with each of her subsequent books. In my opinion, her early novel Windfallen (2003) was pretty awful but One Plus One (2014) was 5 stars in my opinion and Me Before You (2012) was close behind it with 4-5 stars. The Last Letter from Your Lover (2010) is a good read worth 3-4 stars. I am not a fan of political turmoil plot influences and the cigarette smoking dinner party scenes with their anal verbal bantering from the 1960s were a bit boring for me, so that is why I held back a bit in my rating.
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