This is a 2024 book release from Ashley Poston, a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of The Dead Romantics and The Seven Year Slip. She has also written over half a dozen young adult novels. She pursued a marketing design career in the publishing industry before deciding to write full-time.
Eileen Merriweather loves to get lost in a good happily ever after. The fictional kind, anyway. After being dumped by her fiancé just days before her wedding, she’s sworn off falling in love again and feels safe with love stories only in books. Every year, she looks forward to going to her annual book club retreat with her best friend Prudence. Sadly, this year she’ll be travelling there alone, as Prudence is off to Iceland on a romantic getaway. But when her car unexpectedly breaks down on the way, she finds herself stranded in a quaint town that feels like it’s right out of a novel, because it is.
This place can’t be real, and yet she’s somehow arrived in Eloraton, the town of her favourite romance series. Eileen soon discovers that nothing ever changes in Eloraton: the candy store’s honey taffy is always sweet, the local bar’s burgers are always a little burnt, and rain always comes every day in the afternoon. It feels like home. The town is perfectly frozen in the late author’s last unfinished story.
Eileen is convinced that she’s been brought here to help bring the town to its storybook ending. Except there is one character in Eloraton that never appeared in the novels: a grumpy bookstore owner named Anderson. After their relationship gets off to a rocky start, Eileen is sure that he does not want her changing anything in the town. As Eileen interacts with the characters in the town and influences their decision-making, the story begins moving forward again, and Elsy is beginning to think the town’s happily ever after might just be intertwined with her own.
This is a fun, engaging, and easy-to-read romance novel with elements of humour and magic realism. The story does take some time to take off, so you’ll need to be patient to appreciate the overall story.
Eileen (aka Elsy) is a strong protagonist, having a lot of opinions and intellect that are evident in her inner monologues and conversations. The vast majority of Elsy’s interactions and dialogue in the novel are with the storybook characters of Eloraton. Despite there being many colourful characters in the town, many of Elsy’s conversations with them are repetitive and don’t really move the plot forward.
Aside from Elsy, Anderson is the most mysterious and interesting character, and his chemistry with Elsy is very apparent from their first meeting. As their relationship transitions from enemies to friends to lovers, their sexual tension grows exponentially stronger. The few steamy scenes that occur later in the novel are tastefully executed and well placed. The story never explains how Anderson or Elsy stumbled upon Eloraton, and it would be more interesting for readers to be given better insight as to how they arrived there and whether returning one day would be possible.
Narrator Dorothy Billigham Blue delivers a performance with a lot of expression and exuberance. Her tone sometimes sounds a bit too mature for Elsy’s character, and it would have been more interesting for her to have delivered more distinct voices for the different characters. On the positive side, her portrayal of Anderson is perfectly complementary to Elsy, and the chemistry she portrays between them is quite heated and believable.
From early reviews, it seems the consensus of the book community is in agreement that this isn’t the strongest of Piston’s work and somewhat pales in comparison to her wildly popular The Seven Year Slip. But if you’re looking for an easy-to-follow romance with a dose of magical realism and some really interesting characters, this one may still be a good option for you.