A coming of age story
Natalie’s best friend and roommate, Gabby, is dating Rob’s best friend, Angus. At Gabby’s birthday party, Nat and Rob meet and immediately hit it off. Tiny problem…Natalie can’t stand Angus, and when he proposes to Gabby (and Gabby joyfully accepts), Nat feels thrown out in the cold. She channels this anger into her first book, using Angus as inspiration for an irritating doofus who’s not good enough for the heroine’s best friend.
By the time the wedding rolls around, the book is out, though Gabby has dodged reading it, sensing that “Dennis” is based on her fiancé. But Rob, the best man, does read it, and leaves a one-star review, which infuriates Natalie, who is maid of honor. They grind through their duties at the wedding and part as enemies. But they keep running into each other again at events thrown by Gabby and Angus. There’s chemistry there, but each time, something happens that pushes them apart.
What made this book special is that it’s not a rom-com, though it’s packaged the way all rom-coms are these days… a cute title, a heroine who’s a writer, and the ubiquitous cartoon cover of which I am heartily weary. No, One-Star Romance by Laura Hankin is a coming of age story. Natalie is a typical millenial…not earning enough to live alone, going after a dream that doesn’t quite pan out, and trying not to envy her best friend’s life. Gabby is focused, has a dream job, and despite Natalie’s confusion, really loves Angus, who has an extremely lucrative career. In short, they have everything she doesn’t. Nat longs for is a return to when it was just her and her bestie sharing the same issues in their early adulthood. Relationship-wise, Nat’s own mother tells her that a man will tire of her—it’s the nature of relationships—and Natalie doesn’t have a lot of faith that she’ll find “the one.” But of course, she already has.
One-Star Romance spans ten years, and that was another thing I loved. People don’t usually grow and change in two months, after all. We see Rob (who is a point-of-view character) and Natalie dealing with their parental legacies, trying to make names for themselves in their respective careers, finding healthy relationships with other people. They keep circling back to each other via Gabby and Angus, but circumstances are never right.
But my favorite part of the book is the friendship between Natalie and Gabby, which is the most important and stable thing in Natalie’s life. The same cannot be said for Gabby, who has grown up faster, found her person and become a mother in the course of the book. Nat feels abandoned, but this also forces her to find herself. At one point, the women wonder if their friendship is over because they’ve simply moved in such different directions, an experience every woman has had.
I love romantic comedies, of course. But I love books that delve deeper, too, and One-Star Romance is just that. Fully realized, delightfully imperfect characters navigate heartfelt and relatable issues in this winner of a novel.