I am at the beach this week. So I decided to post some of my favorite beach reads instead of writing new reviews.
Summary: Classic guy meets girl romance with a slight literary twist.
Today is my last day at the beach while on vacation. I just have not been reading much this vacation. Instead I have been playing Scrabble and Words with Friends and hanging out in the room. (I break out in hives if I put on too much sunscreen, so I have to limit my sun exposure to a couple hours a day.) I have mostly been reading church focused stuff but not finishing anything.
Yesterday, I gave up and decided to just go fiction. So I looked through my long list of fiction books that I have picked up free from Amazon and pretty much at random chose one. (The cover image on the left was different when I originally picked it up. I think when I got it, it was a statue of Juliet. This cover looks like it should be on a vampire book.)
Finding Juliet is a classic beach read. A light romance without a ton of mental content. The set up is a recently dumped Literature Grad student writes a letter to Juliet (from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet) as a class assignment. The letter is chosen best in class and sent to the Juliet Society in Verona. A letter is written back and soon the guy decides to travel to Italy to meet his Juliet.
This is a classic of the form, both the girl and the guy have been hurt recently. Both end up unintentionally hurting the other. But the guy is gallant and saves the girl. The girl decides to try to move past her hurt and reach out to the guy. There is a brief misunderstanding to provide conflict but in the end guy and girl end up together and live happily ever after.
I might not have even bothered to review this, but honestly I enjoy a little romance every once in a long while. It reminds me not to take for granted the love that I have with my wife. (Even though I really am pretty dense in romance department.) It also reminds me of Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. We all have stories and some times we need to re-write our story. A good story needs some conflict, a story arc and a real goal. True love is as good of a goal as any. Too often we want to skip to the end without all of the messy work that makes us appreciate that goal in the first place. Both the guy and the girl in this story had a deep enough understanding of life to know that they needed to take a chance and re-write their story. I hope we all can have enough wisdom to start re-writing our story when it needs it as well.
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Purchase Links: Kindle Edition (This book is lendable, if you have a kindle or a device with the kindle app and want to borrow it, leave a comment)
Content warning: there is some sex and an attempted rape. It is not real graphic and not a serious focus of the story, but it is present.