Fiction means something invented and therefore untrue. When you make known that you love to read fictions, people assume that you read fictions to escape reality. In fact I alway tell people that fictions can be closer to truths than nonfictions. Most of all the characters in these fictions share desires, fears, moral dilemmas and all kinds of conflicting emotions that we experience from time to time. Often fictions are inspired by true life encounters and experiences. Creative fictions and memoirs definitely inspire and give hopes to their readers. If you always see things from your own perspective, the world shrinks.Reading can expand our views and educate us about the world around us.
I am an avid reader of fictions amongst them literary, thrillers, historical, classics, contemporary, speculative, science fiction and happily ever after stories. I am particularly attracted to stories about book people and the publishing world. I recently binge-watched Younger a television series created by Darren Star. It is based on a novel by Pamela Redmond Satran. It is about a 40-year-old single mother who pretends to be younger than she is in order to find a job in publishing because that is her desired field of work. She is an avid reader and proves to be good and inspiring editor to work with. A big part of the story is about romance, ambition, second chances and friendships.
One Friday evening, when I chanced upon a local bookshop having some promotions, I ended up getting a few more books and one of them was The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston.
Clementine West lives in her aunt’s apartment that Aunt Analea had bequeathed to her. It is a century-old building on the Upper East Side. She works in publicity and marketing for Strass and Adder book publishing and she might be due for a promotion soon. Strass and Adder is a small but powerful publisher in New York city. It specialises in self-help books, travel guides, cookbooks and how tos. She could do publicity anywhere and probably get paid better doing it- but what matters to her is every day you get to walk down ‘the hall lined with books about Rome and Bangkok and Antarctica, the enchanting smell of aged paper like a department store perfume‘.
Clementine is griefing for her aunt’s suicide. Analea used to tell her to keep her passport renewed. ‘ to find work that is fulfilling to your heart and also your head, to never forget to fall in love whenever you can find it because love is nothing if not a matter of timing‘. Most importantly ‘Always chase the moon‘.
While she is griefing for her loss, she is also at a cross road about what she really wants to do for the rest of her life. She is being practical and grounded. She is forgetting to live wide and chase the moon.
When she was eight years old, her aunt, Analea told her that the apartment is magical and she did not mean it metaphorically. When she is in her aunt’s apartment, she finds that her watercolour paintings come alive.As it happens she finds a strange man in her kitchen , His name is Iwan and he has kind eyes, a crooked smile and a recipe for the perfect lemon meringue pie. He seems too perfect. There is a problem. He is from the past. Then they meet again at one work meeting. He is now James Iwan Aston, a successful chef.
As the aunt used to tell her , love is a matter of timing.
The novel is narrated in Clementine’s voice.
‘There was something just so reassuring about books. They had beginnings and middles and ends,and if you didn’t like a part,you could skip to the next chapter.If someone died,you could stop on the last page before, and they’d live on forever.Happy endings were definite, evils defeated , and the good lasted forever.’ –The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston.
I love the caption at the beginning of the book.
‘For all the food lovers out there who burn popcorn in the microwave : we’d be too strong if we could cook, too.’
The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston is an enjoyable read and definitely a sweet tale that bibliophiles and dreamers will truly appreciate. Though the magical element of the story is unreal, the premise of the story is relatable in that you want to be making life choices based on what you want and not what others expect of you. We should try to work towards achieving what we truly feel passionate about and want for ourselves even if success is not guaranteed.
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Bookaholic Macchiato 