Book 642: Evvie Drake Starts Over – Linda Holmes

I discovered Linda Holmes years ago when I started listening to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour and reading what used to be called Monkey See but was re-branded recently to match the podcast. I’ve always appreciated her views and the people she brings to the discussion, so when she started to drop hints that she was working on a novel I was SUPER excited.

I was also psyched to see the public radio shout out so early in the book, “She took down one of two public-radio fundraising mugs from the cabinet, leaving behind the one with the thin coat of dust on its upturned bottom.” (10). There’s another scene when Evvie is trying to decide what to do with some money and the list of charities she wants to support is just perfect.

After waiting for what felt like months on the library list, I finally got to read it. And it was a struggle, not in that it was a struggle to read, but in that I struggled between wanting to read this as fast as I could and read it as slow as possible. In the end I luxuriated over some chapters and blazed through others.

Holmes (I really want to call her Linda since I’ve listened to her for 6 years :-D, but I’ll stick to the norms) wrote an incredibly rewarding romantic comedy set in small town Maine. She crafted two incredibly realistic and believable characters in Evvie (pronounced like Chevy) Drake and Dean Tenney. I’m not usually a fan of a character, especially a titular one, that spends so much time in their own head, but Holmes made it work really well. The supporting characters were developed as much as they needed to be, especially Andy (Evvie’s best friend). I felt the small town could’ve used even more personality even though it had plenty, but I think that’s only because of how well she did Evvie and Dean.

And Holmes nailed the comedy portion of the rom-com novel. I laughed out loud on so many occasions I probably could’ve just highlighted the book, but these were particularly entertaining:

“Oh, yes. So they’re all standing there, and finally Denny Paraday—who plays shortstop and is emceeing the thing—says, ‘GO!’ and they go. And they’re sort of run-waddling toward first, and Bree is so short that the costume comes down to her ankles, but for reasons that defy the laws of physics, she’s motoring. And she’s the first one to get to first base, but the actual bases have been removed so the kids won’t trip. And she can’t see, so she keeps going, and she’s clearly going to run straight into the Righteous Heating and Plumbing sign on the right-field fence. Somebody yells, ‘Turn, Cheerios!’ And she pivots, and with some kind of internal GPS or magnets in her head or whatever, she heads straight for second. She’s like a bloodhound. And when she gets there, they have to do it again—‘Turn, Cheerios!’ She turns.” (39)

“Cute boy, dry car, bookstore trip, and now a warm ass. It was like the universe had forgotten her first fifteen birthdays and was rolling them into one big gift.” (47)

“In the afternoon, she sat in the tub, shaving and trimming various zones with a precision she’d previously associated with building ships in bottles, then slathering everything with lotion.” (189)

“She hadn’t yet turned to ‘anti-aging,’ but she figured ‘revitalizing’ was for over thirty and under forty, ‘anti-aging’ was for over forty and under seventy, and then when you were seventy, you just told everybody to fuck off.” (191)

Seriously, if you’re hesitating reading this, go find the cereal box race section and read it. If you don’t laugh about that, you should probably get checked out.

And then in contrast her observation about interpersonal interactions and the experience of being human were just as insightful and often just as humorous.

“The amount of time people who have just met are supposed to look directly at each other, particularly without talking, is a unit that’s both very short and very precise. When you exceed it, you get suspicious, or you get threatened, or you get this flicker of accidental intimacy, like you’ve peeked at the person naked through a shower door.” (33)

“Rose sighed, and it made Evvie think that seven was too young to have a sigh like that in her vocabulary. A sarcastic sigh, yes. An angry-and-frustrated sigh, yes. But not one that sounded like a fifty-year-old diner waitress.” (98)

“Eveleth had always hated how blushing felt. It was accompanied by such a miserable desire to cease to be, utterly, to turn into a fog that could be waved away. This blush, though, was like blooming, like she might look down and see petals flutter from her own shoulders.” (157)

I’m not joking when I say as I read the last 50-75 pages on the elliptical at the gym and laughed out loud, teared up, and grinned like an idiot. The writing and the story were enough to make me forget where I was and who was around me.

Recommendation: A wonderful read. You could read it curled up by the fire or lying on a beach and you’d get two different experiences (hopeful and longing maybe?) Overall, the writing was incredibly smooth and I loved the characters. Most of the novel was from Evvie’s point of view, but there were a couple of instances where it shifted and it was jarring, but I’ve read a lot worse attempts at shifting POV. I was SO glad there wasn’t a time-removed epilogue, the more of those I read the more I don’t like them.

Opening Line: “GO NOW, OR YOU’LL NEVER go, Evvie warned herself.”

Closing Line: “She busted out laughing.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes from Evvie Drake Starts Over
“Effie’s Scandinavian grandmother had claimed that young women dream about the husbands they want, old women dream about the husbands they wanted, and only the luckiest women, for a moment in the middle, dream about the husbands they’ve got.” (9)

“I think every plan I ever had involved everything happening later. You’re twenty-two, twenty-three, time is sort of infinite. It’s like a pool where you can’t touch the bottom. I knew there would be something else, but it was always after. After, after. It was like I was waiting for something to start, and I was actually in the middle of it the whole time. Does that make sense?” (76)

“That therapy is like a toothbrush. You can’t really put it to use for anybody except yourself.” (109)

“They’d want to forgive him, and it wouldn’t be because they were merciful. It would be because the flavor had gone out of hating him like it goes out of cheap gum, and now they needed to taste something different.” (141)

“But come to think of it, I did learn that dirty texting is too fuckin’ embarrassing for me. I know everybody does it now, but I swear, the most boring things you do during sex sound totally deviant if you type them out. You’ve done something all your adult life and when you write it down, it’s like, ‘Who would do that?’ I remember trying to describe how I would kiss her shoulder—her fuckin’ shoulder!—and I felt like a farmer talking about how to knock up a horse. I might just be bad at it, though. Describing, not kissing.” (196)

“She would not be one of those women who watched someone sleep, she thought. It was creepy. So she closed her eyes and listened instead to the inhale and the exhale, the trading of air for air without effort. She synced her breath to it, and she went back to sleep.” (204)

“When she started to cry, the upside was as it always was: the shower cry takes the logistics out of it. Crying has to be dealt with—it makes a mess, it swells up your face, it creates a little pile of tissues that are a tell. But the shower cry is the superspy’s cry, Evvie had always thought. It was between you and the tile walls, and everything that hurt turned into water, and the water went away.” (232)