Let's Bust a Recap : Dear Emmie Blue

Okay, so on Monday we talked about A Man Called Ove which was my book club's book of the month for August. Today, we're talking about Dear Emmie Blue which was my book club's book of the month for last August. Oy vey. We're getting caught up around here, but it's a process.

Dear Emmie Blue by UK author Lia Louis was published just a couple summers ago in 2020. It was generally well-received, but for some reason it didn't quite hit the mark for me.

At the outset, we meet Emmie who is meeting up with her best friend Lucas because he has something important to ask her. Emmie, who has been secretly in love with Lucas for six years, thinks he's finally going to admit he has feelings for her as well and ask her out. The bombshell: he's proposed to his ex-girlfriend and wants Emmie to be his "best woman" at their wedding. Obvious devastation ensues. Of course, Emmie says yes—she can never say no to Lucas—but that means a lot of painful involvement in getting her unrequited love ready to walk down the aisle to share his life with another woman. It also means she has to spend quite a bit of time with Eliot, Lucas' older brother, with whom she had a serious falling out eleven years prior over a devastating betrayal of trust. All of this comes together in a sweet package of what it means to navigate relationships—not just romantic ones!—in a healthy way in life.

All the elements were there to make for a great book, but they somehow didn't add up for me. I liked Louis' ability to seamlessly tease Emmie's past circumstances in a way that felt slightly mysterious and kept you reading while still moving the story forward. I thought her writing style was funny and easy to read. And her insertion of text conversations and mixed CD playlists served the story well instead of being clunky as they sometimes have a tendency to be in other things I've read.

But, the actual development of relationships was sorely lacking. Hurtful choices made my different characters—particularly Lucas—seemed to just magically work themselves out with no real consequences or communication. While I could go with Louis' setup of different conflicts throughout the novel, very few were resolved realistically. I was left at the end of the book with a lot more questions than answers. 

On top of that, Emmie's friend Rosie, who is most certainly written for a bit of comic relief, was over-the-top crass which was the final nail in the coffin for keeping me from recommending this book. 

Overall, I enjoyed reading Dear Emmie Blue and it's staying on my shelf for now, but it ultimately fell flat for me and I wouldn't recommend it.