On the Same Page | Landline | Rainbow Rowell

Landline • Rainbow Rowell

We were all so stoked to read LANDLINE, friends, that we bumped it up in our monthly schedule when all three of us managed to snag advanced copies. Because RAINBOW. And because reading any of her books, whether they are geared towards young adults or full grown-ups, always have an impact on all three of us.

LANDLINE is about a relationship that is struggling. Rainbow tells amazing stories about relationships, and the one between Georgie McCool (I KNOWWW) and her husband, Neal, is fraying. Georgie writes for a TV comedy and Neal is a stay-at-home dad to their two girls. When Georgie and her long-time friend and writing partner get news of a potential big break right before Christmas, Georgie and Neal’s relationship goes from “just ok” to “MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” Neal heads off with the girls to Nebraska as the family planned, and Georgie stays behind in LA to work on her TV show. Except when she starts spending time in her old bedroom at her mom’s house, she finds an old rotary phone in her closet and uses it to call Neal’s parents’ house to talk to her husband. And THAT’S when things get INTERESTING.

So, in LANDLINE, when Georgie uses her old rotary phone to call her husband in Nebraska, what she actually winds up doing is calling BACK IN TIME to when Georgie and Neal were still in college and just dating. She speaks to Neal’s father, even though he has recently passed away in real time. Most importantly, though, she speaks to Neal. For hours and hours they talk, college Neal and adult Georgie. Georgie uses these phone calls to sort through the issues that she’s having in her marriage, and to talk things out with Neal. To reassure herself that their marriage isn’t ending or already over, and that they love each other enough.

What happens, though, is that through flashbacks, we see that Neal and Georgie almost broke up once before, just before they got engaged, and Georgie realizes that she’s talking to Neal in the past right at the time when they are having their huge fight.The timelines become a little twisted, I think, when she realizes that one of the conversations she, present-Georgie, has with past-Neal played a role in their engagement.

Does your brain hurt? Mine does. But this is the thing I wanted to talk about this month. Not so much the phone calls themselves, which are so wonderful and reason enough to want to read LANDLINE, but rather the alternate timelines, and the way that the past and the present run together. It’s such an interesting plot device, even if there were a few times in LANDLINE when I was still figuring out what was going on and I was super confused.

LANDLINE reminded me of Back to the Future quite a bit. In fact, “back to the future” is the PERFECT phrase to describe the phone calls Georgie and Neal have from Georgie’s rotary phone. I’m a big fan of circular timelines. How something in the future affects something in the past and vice versa. It basically BLOWS MY MIND. In LANDLINE, I loved how present-Georgie is the one who fixes the relationship between past-Neal and Georgie, and all of these things from Georgie’s past begin making just a little bit more sense.

These phone calls were easily my favorite part of LANDLINE, even though I enjoyed all of it. Well, these phone calls and the flashbacks to Georgie and Neal meeting in college and dating and moving to California for Georgie’s job. The present time is sad in the way that Georgie and Neal know that things aren’t right but can’t seem to break out of their rut long enough to fix it. It’s really the conversations Georgie has with Neal that make all the difference twice over: they convince past-Neal that his relationship with Georgie is worth making sacrifices for, and they help present-Georgie figure out how to save her marriage.

Sometimes these overlapping timelines can get incredibly confusing. It’s one of the best and worst things about books that deal with time travel or alternate universes or things like that. But Rainbow Rowell really used it to great effect in LANDLINE. This book is about relationships, like all of her books are, and she imbues something that’s usually more science-fiction than romance with emotion. Sure, it wasn’t always clear to me what was going on in the early stages, but it all fits in the end. Big fan of LANDLINE, and Rainbow, and magical rotary phones (even though I don’t remember ever using one).

Check out Brittany and Alyssa‘s posts about LANDLINE! And come back next month for July’s On the Same Page book, UNSPOKEN by Sarah Rees Brennan!