Nora and Liz by Nancy Garden

Nora and Liz by Nancy Garden

Bella Books, 2002

Overview: Nora is reasonably happy with her quiet life in rural Rhode Island, until city girl Liz shows up at her front door with a flat tire and she begins to see the possibilities outside her limited country existence.

My Reaction: I had high hopes for this book, since it's by the famed Nancy Garden, author of Annie on My Mind, one of the most influential (and frequently banned) LGBT young adult novels written in the 20th century. Nora and Liz is Garden's first adult romance, and for me, it fell flat. Before I go into the many issues I had with it, I'll admit that the sappy part of me enjoyed rooting for Liz and Nora to live happily ever after. If you want a sweet, gentle romance (the kind of gentle where the lovebirds take hands, walk up the stairs, and close the bedroom door behind them), I think you'll enjoy this book, despite its flaws.

The critical part of me had difficultly suspending enough disbelief to get into the story. I found Nora especially hard to understand. She is nearly forty, lives in a house with no electricity, running water or phone, and doesn't even drive because her misogynistic dad doesn't think women are capable. Maybe I could understand her lack of rebellion if she lived in isolation, but she is surrounded by women who drive, and has never once thought to question her father's judgement until Liz comes along. I am all for the transformative power of love, but I have a hard time believing that a forty-year-old woman doesn't have the ovaries to stand up to her ageing father for probably twenty years, then suddenly gets the nerve to completely change her life over the course of one summer. Actually, I had a hard time believing that either character was forty - they just didn't seem mature enough. I often felt they had the over-emotional quality found in so many young adult novels that I identified with so well as a teenager, but that now seems a like a little too much to handle. Garden IS primarily a YA author, after all, and I think it shows.

I had a hard time deciding which rating to give Nora and Liz , since my reactions to it were so mixed. I decided on a "meh," not because it's poorly written on a technical level, but because I couldn't identify with the characters. Yes, I wanted them to be happy, but I couldn't see myself in them, and isn't that what reading a romance should be all about?