Would you travel almost 3000 miles for a childhood sweetheart you haven’t spoken to in twenty years? I probably wouldn’t either, but apparently some people would, and what better way to tell us that story than…a voicemail message, a blog post and legal notes?
Almost Like Being in Love follows Travis and Craig, two unlikely high school sweethearts who hit it off with each other, before they each move across the United States for college. Fast forward twenty years, and despite having no contact with each other, Travis realises he was wrong to have let Craig go. Told through a range of media including legal notes, blog posts, letters and text messages, Travis decides the only way forward is to travel across the country to regain his lost love.
I read the description of this book and was very excited to get into it, with the unique form of storytelling instantly catching my attention. But sadly, this novelty wore off very quickly. The disorganisation of the different media types makes the storytelling very jumpy, difficult to follow any of the characters in any sort of depth and leaves you spending a lot of time trying to figure out who’s talking, and about what and whom. If the underlying story was particularly interesting, this may have helped. Instead, we have a very basic, long lost love story with our characters going beyond any sort of reasonable length to reunite, broken up and shuffled into tiny chunks and sorted into tens of different communication types.
I completely understand what this book was trying to go for, but sadly it missed the mark at every point in this book’s development. In a film form (with a much-needed rewrite), this storytelling type may be better communicated, but at present, it’s 350 pages of confusion.
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Almost Like Being in Love (ISBN: 0-06-059583-3) was published in 2004. A copy is available to borrow from the LGBTQ+ Lending Library in the LGBTQ+ Lounge
