Review: Eight Perfect Hours

Lia Louis’s novel Dear Emmie Blue completely blew me away in 2020 so I was very much looking forward to her 2021 release, Eight Perfect Hours. It took me awhile to get to it – only reading it earlier this year – but I quite enjoyed it. Perhaps not as much as the earlier novel but it was still a good story in its own right.

Here’s the book’s description:

On a snowy evening in March, 30-something Noelle Butterby is on her way back from an event at her old college when disaster strikes. With a blizzard closing off roads, she finds herself stranded, alone in her car, without food, drink, or a working charger for her phone. All seems lost until Sam Attwood, a handsome American stranger also trapped in a nearby car, knocks on her window and offers assistance. What follows is eight perfect hours together, until morning arrives and the roads finally clear.
The two strangers part, positive they’ll never see each other again, but fate, it seems, has a different plan. As the two keep serendipitously bumping into one another, they begin to realize that perhaps there truly is no such thing as coincidence.

First things first. This one was, for some reason, somewhat marketed as a Christmas/holiday novel. I don’t know if that was the intention of the publisher or if it wasn’t even them marketing it, it was early readers deciding that a book released in the late fall with a cute, wintery cover MUST be a Christmas book. It’s so not. The story opens in March. *checks calendar* Yeah, nowhere near Christmas. It’s not even really a wintery novel. Noelle and Sam get meet each other because of a freak snowstorm and the rest of the novel takes place over the following months. So, basically, you could read this one at any time of year and be delighted.

You really have to believe – or allow yourself to believe for the length of the novel – in the concept of fate to be able to fully enjoy this story. It was a sweet idea and something I had fun thinking about while reading. It was a nice little escape from *waves arms at world* The little coincidences that were revealed throughout the story were sometimes completely unexpected and kept things from getting too predictable.

Noelle’s ex-boyfriend was a complete asshat. She’s the caregiver to her mother, who had had a stroke a few years prior and really struggled with going out because she knew she wasn’t the person she used to be. So things fell to Noelle. All the things, basically. Earning money, paying bills, and so on. Her ex couldn’t understand why she kept looking after her mother and didn’t go after what she really wanted in life (to be a floral designer). No one can fully understand someone else’s life but he was such a…well, kind of a gaslighting jerk about it. She deserved so much better and I hated reading as she got sucked back into his orbit. I might be a bit harsh but I had such a “yuck” feeling when reading the scenes with him that that feeling has stuck with me way more than some of the other things about this book.

Sam, on the other hand, was lovely. That said, I don’t feel like I really got to know either character enough over the course of the story which may have kept me from enjoying it as much as I expected. I cared about them both, most definitely. I wanted to read their Happily Ever After. But there just seemed to be a little something missing from their development.

All in all, Eight Perfect Hours was a lovely read. It wasn’t, unfortunately, perfect but if you want a sweet, reflective read, Lia Louis’s latest might be the one for you.

Some content warnings: death of a friend/family member years prior, depression (including postpartum), suicide.

My review of Dear Emmie Blue

*An egalley of this novel was provided by the publisher, Simon & Schuster Canada, via NetGalley in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*

Review: Dear Emmie Blue

Oh, Emmie. You randomly came across my reading pile and quickly found your way into my heart. The cover of Lia Louis's second novel was what originally caught my eye but then one of my favourite authors mentioned she had read, and loved, Dear Emmie Blue. I figured, what the heck. I'd request it from NetGalley and see what it was like. And oh my word, I fell head over heels for this story. It was a surprise, not that it was great, exactly, but that I was so completely, totally in love.

Here's the synopsis:

At sixteen, Emmie Blue stood in the fields of her school and released a red balloon into the sky. Attached was her name, her email address…and a secret she desperately wanted to be free of. Weeks later, on a beach in France, Lucas Moreau discovered the balloon and immediately emailed the attached addressed, sparking an intense friendship between the two teens.

Now, fourteen years later, Emmie is hiding the fact that she’s desperately in love with Lucas. She has pinned all her hopes on him and waits patiently for him to finally admit that she’s the one for him. So dedicated to her love for Lucas, Emmie has all but neglected her life outside of this relationship—she’s given up the search for her absentee father, no longer tries to build bridges with her distant mother, and lives as a lodger to an old lady she barely knows after being laid off from her job. And when Lucas tells Emmie he has a big question to ask her, she’s convinced this is the moment he’ll reveal his feelings for her. But nothing in life ever quite goes as planned, does it?

Emmie Blue is about to learn everything she thinks she knows about life (and love) is just that: what she thinks she knows. Is there such thing as meant to be? Or is it true when they say that life is what happens when you are busy making other plans?

Emmie is a huge reason why I loved this book. She's just turning 30 when we meet her (as is Lucas - they share a birthday) and feels like she should have her life more "together" than it is. That is something I most definitely can relate to. Sometimes I'm still surprised that I'm supposed to be a real adult. She also has a lot of pain in her past, especially from when she was a teen, that she's never really dealt with. Until she realizes she has to work through what happened to her, she can't quite move on and isn't aware of some of the really wonderful things, and people, in her life.

You may think that it would be frustrating for the reader when it's so clear that Emmie needs to face her past head on so she can move forward. That she's putting walls up and not fully allowing people in who the reader can see would be so good for her. I wasn't frustrated. I actually felt some of the pain right along with Emmie and was surprised at how emotional I was getting while reading the book. Louis makes the reader feel all the feels with this novel so be prepared. It's hard sometimes but it's part of what makes this book so magical.

When I first started the book, it reminded me a lot of the movie Love, Rosie which is based on Cecelia Ahern's novel Where Rainbows End. This was a rare case of not having read the book before the movie so I don't know how much was changed in the adaptation, but the similarities between this book and the movie were strong. The storylines eventually diverged and become more dissimilar as time went on but the feeling I was left with after finishing both Dear Emmie Blue and Love, Rosie was really similar and I was glad to have found another story that made my heart warm (after making it hurt). 

While the majority of the novel's plot is about family, friends, and professional issues, a good chunk of it is also about a romance. Emmie's realized she's completely hung up on Lucas, who she's known for 14 years. Like, full blown, hopelessly devoted in love with him. The reader has a clearer view than Emmie of how the romance should play out and I was thrilled when she finally caught up to what I was seeing. 

Dear Emmie Blue is full of every emotion you can imagine. Some good, some bad, but that's life and Lia Louis has written a novel that is so lovely and realistic and heartwarming that you can forgive the bad because the good is so, so wonderful. This novel gave me a major book hangover and it will stick with me for a long, long time. I highly recommend it!

*An egalley of this novel was provided by the publisher, Simon & Schuster Canada, via NetGalley in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*