The Keeper of Stars

Book club pick. (So stop reading Sydney!) I'm just going to start typing and hopefully will form some coherent thoughts about this along the way.

The story/romance between Ellie and Jack was engaging even if the writing was only decent. I can see why this is getting comparisons to The Notebook, even though I thought this was way less sappy than any Sparks.

My big complaint to Matt when I was finished? The romance was too realistic. I KNOW. Long distance is hard! Having different goals in life than your partner is hard! Being a grown up and making grown-up decisions is hard! There were no fake relationships or secret dukes!

Turner describes himself in his author bio as an author of romance novels, but romance novels as a genre have requirements, which he did not meet. If he had lopped off the first and last chapters and just let it be set in the 1950s and 60s, it would have met them. I don't know why he thought we needed to know in the last chapter that Ellie died in the early days of Covid, though Covid is not mentioned at all. It took the previous chapter's satisfactory ending, and instead made my face do this: