The Dating Game: “November 9,” Colleen Hoover

So, I’m strolling along near my brother’s home in Maryland, and I see a Little Library. I love those, don’t you? We don’t have too many in Brooklyn. To quote from the film “Clerks”: “Bunch of savages in this town.” Such a thing wouldn’t last 20 minutes before someone blows it up with an M-80.

Coho is an easy pick-up, then. I’d read It Ends with Us a few years ago, because everyone else did. So, I knew it’d be at least good, maybe even great.

What a concept, and what a degree of difficulty! A one-time child actress (Fallon)falls for a budding writer (Ben) when he fakes as her boyfriend in a sticky situation. There’s an attraction, and maybe a thought that this thing could be real. But since they’re headed separate ways, they make an odd pact: meet up only on the same day every year. She’s doing it partly because she likes him, and partly to inspire him to write about it all in his first novel. Each year they come back together, with no contact whatsoever in between, and they fall deeper and deeper for each other. Each of them has flaws and secrets, however, and it threatens to rip them apart…or worse.

I did a lousy job of summarizing, because for one thing, it’s far more complex. For another, to say too much would employ spoilers. There’s your degree of difficulty: explain such an odd idea without giving away the ending. That’s beyond my capacity.

That said, the love affair between these two very young adults is sweet and endearing. Yes, it stretches the believable just a tad: you do have to suspend belief that two people are so bloody attracted in such a short time and over a year of doing other things. But that’s why it’s fiction, folks. And Coho does what she does: hooks us in with enough interpersonal goodies that we can just believe it all.

Perhaps more so than “Ends,” Coho embeds and hides secrets in clever ways throughout the early chapters. Then she whips them out and smacks us with them in pivotal spots. Ben’s end of things was very well hidden, and I got it about his novel: poetry it ain’t, but it becomes…well, no spoilers! See for yourself.

Good pace here, as usual. A friend called this author “dark,” but I thought it was OK. The voices of each character were pretty good, if not totally unique. I liked the supporting cast as well. The choices they all made were consistent. It ends well, satisfying. Yeah, I got my money’s worth.

OK, that was a joke. No Little Libraries near me, though. Wanna borrow it? DM me.