I met Elisa Lorello this summer when her debut novel, Faking It, was released and I wrote a review for her. Now she’s back with the sequel Ordinary World. Although both books feature the same characters, they are like two sides of the coin called “love”. Faking It is a fun romantic comedy where you’re laughing 80% of the time with only 20% of your time spent crying a few tears. With Ordinary World she explores the grief that comes from the loss of true love and, although you spend 80 % of your time crying, that 20% that has you laughing conveys the unquenchable hope we all feel.
Elisa Lorello is on a WOW Blog Tour so you can learn more about her and her books(she’s busy on her third) by visiting other blogs along her tour. You can also read excerpts of her books at her website.
Faking It
Author: Elisa Lorello
Paperback: 220 pages(also available as Kindle)
Publisher: Elisa Lorello (June 6, 2009)
Synposis:
What happens when a writing professor and a male escort become friends? Thirty-four-year old professor Andi Cutrone has broken up with her fiancé in Massachusetts, moved back to her native New York, and wants to be a better lover. So after meeting Devin, a handsome, charming escort, she proposes an unusual arrangement: lessons about writing in exchange for lessons about sex. When Devin accepts Andi’s proposal, he draws up a contract in which the two are forbidden to see each other socially. There’s just one problem: Andi also wants Devin. Faking It is a witty, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heart-wrenching story about relationships, writing, and getting real.
Review:
When I first dove into Faking It I worried that the premise–Andi Cutrone, a young urbanite takes `love lessons’ from a male escort–might be a little too Sex and the City for me. But the weekly lessons surprised me. Instead of sex, they focus on Andi’s feeling about herself, her body, her relationships. Somewhere in that tangle of confused emotions every female reader will recognize either the woman she is or the woman she once was.
Then, about a third of the way through the book(yes, I checked the page number)I realized that the weekly lessons, although illuminating and the hook that pulled me in, had become secondary. Instead characters had become paramount. I wondered more about what Andi and her love tutor/platonic friend Devin would do on the other six days of the week. This book could have become an excuse to lurch from love scene to love scene but author Elisa Lorello created believable people that eclipsed their careers(one boring and one naughty). Ultimately, a book that seemed to be about taboo subjects like sex for money was really about something much more prosaic–changes. Changing attitudes. Changing careers. Changing partners.
My biggest round of applause goes out to Lorello for keeping me guessing. Too often books that contain romances follow a predictable formula. We know who the good boyfriend is. We know who the bad boyfriend is. We know who she’ll wind up with. The only question mark is what will happen along the way. Faking It kept me guessing until the last page. Really! Thank you Elisa for characters and complex personalities that propelled me to the last page.
Ordinary World
Author: Elisa Lorello
Paperback: 295 pages(also available as Kindle)
Publisher: Elisa Lorello(November 1, 2009)
Synposis:
Six years after leaving New York, Andi has everything she wants: a tenured professorship at Northampton University in Massachusetts, a published collection of essays, good friends, and a blissful relationship with her husband. But what happens when tragedy strikes and the world as she knows it changes in an instant?
Author Elisa Lorello reunites us with Andi and has created a story of love and loss, joy and sorrow, and heartbreak and hope, all the while keeping us hooked through the laughter and tears.
Review:
The last line of Elisa Lorello’s first book could have been “and they lived happily ever after.” Except Elisa Lorello doesn’t write fairy tales. And sometimes people die. Reading Ordinary World truly felt like living through the loss of a loved one with a friend. You begin devastated with Andi, but as happens in real life, you get over the death before her and want to drag her along into happiness with you. Several times I wanted to shake her and say “Get over it already.” I was impressed by Lorello’s ability to portray the path of grief as not a straight line but as a constant “three steps forward, two steps back.” So often in fiction, a grieving character has a turning point and from then on they’re constantly moving toward happiness. Lorello shows that tentative first move toward happiness but also the withdrawal from it, the guilt, the anger. The grief journey of Andi is real.
Andi’s meeting up with an old lover in romantic Italy felt a bit contrived at first but I couldn’t resist. It did underline the fact that they were meant to be together if they could find each other thousands of miles from home. The exploration of her family relationships(who were minor characters in the first book) was fascinating and reveals so much about Andi’s attitude to life, love and grief. I found myself wanting to go back and re-read Faking It with new eyes now that I had a peek inside her family.
As you near the end of this book you’ll find yourself turning the pages faster and faster wanting to learn how Andi finally rearranges her life. There are so many options and you’re never sure which will suit Andi until the last page. I had to restrain myself from peeking ahead just to know how it turned out. My recommendation? Don’t peek! The journey Andi takes is just as important as her ultimate decision.
A Sequel Note: Even though this is a sequel, the plot lines of the books are not so interlinked that you can read Ordinary World even if you haven’t already read Faking It. But if you do read Ordinary World first you’re going to want to go back to Faking It just to discover more about the characters you’ve met.