FIVE YEARS LATER

A young Oregonian woman navigates her parents’ divorce and her own romantic complications in a coming-of-maturity novel.

In 2017, Elle Fox is a 23-year-old would-be writer living in a suburban town near Portland, Oregon. While waiting for her career as a novelist to begin, she’s taken a job at the Portland Diamond jewelry company, where she works with “glittering, timeless things.” She’s also healing from her parents’ recent split and from the dramatic collapse, five years ago, of her intense relationship with the erratic Scott Darcy, who worked at her father’s auto repair shop. Elle hasn’t crossed paths with Scott since then—until one June morning, when they run into each other in a Starbucks parking lot. As a result, Elle is thrown into emotional turmoil once again, so she accepts her friend Kacey’s invitation to a July 4th beach house party on the Oregon coast, looking for escape. The weekend doesn’t prove to be the carefree getaway she’d hoped, though, as Scott shows up as well. To make matters worse, the handsome, wealthy Noah, on whom Elle has a crush, turns out to be friends with Elle’s estranged father—whoalsoshows up at the coast. Over the course of this book, Kraft’s brightly humorous narrative skillfully spins out Elle’s story, hopping between tantalizing sections set in 2012 and 2017. This narrative structure gives the work a dynamic sense of suspense that meshes nicely with Elle’s own inability to face the traumas of her past. However, the protagonist’s repeated unwillingness to listen to Scott as he tries to explain himself, and their verbal sparring in general, gets tiresome, and the book’s Jane Austen references feel forced and unnecessary. That said, the reader will be drawn in by the vivid characters and by writing that’s sprightly in its evocative descriptions; for example, a young woman is said to have an “athletic vampire look,” and boxes of car parts are described as “stacked against the wall like a losing game of Tetris.”

An engaging and often skillfully written romance.