Book Lovers

Dark-haired, amber-eyed Charlie Lastra has a penchant for black clothing and a severity that has him branded as “Count von Lastra” (114). His reputation as an editor in the New York publishing world is “Storm Cloud,” and he is almost equally as intimidating as Nora (51). However, his handsome, confident exterior and withering remarks mask a lonely past as a misfit in the small town of Sunshine Falls. The open secret of Charlie’s illegitimacy separated him from other kids, while his obsessions, first with cars and then with books, added to his sense of not fitting in. Unlike Nora’s other boyfriends, who judge her as cold and overly career-focused, Charlie understands the reasoning behind her decisions and praises her as supremely loyal and passionate. He, thus, sees as attractive the qualities that a patriarchal society stereotypes as unattractive in women.

Still, while Charlie is career-focused, he is also astonishingly generous and self-sacrificing, as he is willing to give up his life in New York to help his parents and Libby’s family. Although he senses that Nora could be his soulmate, he puts his duty before his feelings and well-being, as he determines that he must help his parents run their bookshop. While his sense of duty towards family mirrors Nora’s own, establishing his position as her soulmate, by remaining in Sunshine Falls and sacrificing his personal happiness for others, he does the opposite of the advice he gives Nora. It is only through the pressure of both their families that Charlie moves back to New York and embraces personal happiness. Charlie’s willingness to put others before himself make him an atypical male romantic hero, as he acts from a place of generosity rather than self-promotion or advancement.

Petite, curvy Libby is a “chaotic, charming nineties rom-com heroine who’s always running late and is windblown in a cute and sexy way” (154). Libby is fun-loving, spontaneous, and emotional, with a penchant for romance novels and list of small-town “dares.” From the outset, Nora considers her strawberry-blonde sister to be a more typical romantic heroine than she is. Nora imagined that Libby would always fall in and out of love like their mother, and Nora would be there to comfort her. However, Libby surprised Nora by settling down at 20 with a man who was nine years her senior and having three children. Libby, who is pregnant with her third child and has no viable career trajectory, is set up as the opposite to Nora, who is career-minded and clear about the fact that she does not want to have children. Still, in the course of the novel, we learn that Libby has abundant creativity and potential, but she has found no consistent channel for its expression. The move to Sunshine Falls and the encounter with Goode Books are beneficial to her, as they enable her to bring a project to its fruition and give her an identity outside of motherhood.

While Nora played a vital role in Libby’s upbringing, both before and after her mother’s death, by offering her stability, encouragement, and much-needed funds, Nora must learn to let go of her image of Libby as the dependent and allow her sister to be an adult. Similarly, Libby, who has the elaborate secret plan of moving Nora to Sunshine Falls along with the rest of her family, must learn to accept that her sister is different from her. Each sister imagines the other as a version of their mother: While Nora imagines that Libby has their mother’s damsel-in-distress quality, Libby thinks Nora has their mother’s single-minded career ambition. In the final third of the novel, the sisters must be honest with one another and get to know each other again. This enables them to become closer than ever, despite living in separate cities.

According to Nora, her beautiful, strawberry-blonde, struggling-actress mother was “magic” (154). Nora’s mother was homeschooled and came from a poor, conservative family who cut her off when she became pregnant at 17. While Nora’s father stayed with her a few years, he ran out when she was pregnant with Libby, stating that he was not ready to be a father yet. Although Nora’s mother looms large in the narrative, she died from an unmentioned cause prior to the events of the novel, on the night Nora stayed with Jakob. Given that no sickness is mentioned and the girls were unprepared for the death, it seems to have been caused by an accident or medical emergency that traumatized her daughters.

Still, Nora’s view of her mother is adoring. Nora reveres her mother for raising her and Libby in New York City alone and never giving up on her dream as an actress. She admires her ability to make their lives full of wonder on a budget and even her unfailing optimism and open-hearted attitude to romance. Nora’s attachment to the city is part of her feeling of closeness to her mother and her unwillingness to let her mother go. At the end of the novel, when Nora learns to accept loss and comfort herself without her mother, this represents progress in the grief process.

Nevertheless, her memories of her mother’s highs and lows and the image of her “running out to catch a cab, hair curled and smiling lips painted, only to come home with streaks of mascara down her face” make Nora determined not to imitate her in romantic relationships (206). Even before Nora met Jakob, she decided, based on the example of her mother, that falling in love was not worth it. Thus, Nora did not have a healthy role model of how a woman in a relationship should act, and this was a contributing factor to her avoidance of love.

Soft-hearted Libby has a different view of her mother than Nora does. Libby saw their mother as a chaotic and miserable woman who chased her dreams at the expense of parenting her daughters. Libby’s view that their mother relied excessively on Nora gives the reader the insight that Nora was given too much responsibility at a young age and that this shaped her controlling ways. 

As with Nora’s mother, “novelist-turned-rancher” Jakob is another important character from the heroine’s past that the reader does not directly meet (95). Henry leaves the specifics of Jakob’s appearance and character vague: He was a few years older than Nora and left New York for Wyoming to do a writers’ residency soon after Nora’s mother’s death. While in Wyoming, Jakob met the girl he left Nora for, making him the boyfriend who initiated Nora’s pattern. Although Nora is uncertain of whether Jakob was the one, she is unable to fully process his abandonment of her in a time of need, as the memory of that time is enmeshed with that of her mother’s death.

Although Jakob was with Nora for a relatively short period of time, he represents the redirection of her life. Initially, when Nora was set to move in with Jakob, she was on the path toward an autonomous adult life and had left behind the idea that being in love would mean becoming like her mother. However, when her mother died, and Libby was unable to reach Nora while she was at Jakob’s, she transferred her loyalties away from him to focus on her sister. She has since been on the path of workaholism and trying to ensure Libby’s security to avoid the memory of her vulnerability. While Nora has internalized the shame of Jakob’s rejection, Charlie points out that Jakob is the one who should feel ashamed for not being there for Nora when she was at her most vulnerable. Nora’s ability to tell Charlie about Jakob and his response to the story cement their compatibility.

Grant is Nora’s boyfriend in the prologue who leaves her for a country girl after a trip to San Antonio, Texas. Grant is a flat character who merely appears to exemplify Nora’s dating pattern and her place as the dumped city girlfriend in romance tropes. While the stereotypical romance novel might accept that Grant, “the son of a billionaire hotel mogul,” would give up the privileges of a city life to help his rural sweetheart’s parents run a hotel, Nora judges this turn of events improbable (4). Nora’s laughter is a metafictional moment that signals her ridicule of this genre of books; however, she is at the same time bemused at serially finding herself scripted as a character in them.

Bearded, emerald-eyed hunk Shepherd is set up as the type of man with whom Nora could exact perfect revenge on her exes. Nora seems aware of this, even commenting that his carpenter profession is a “common trope” for the hero in romantic books and movies because “it’s how you show someone’s down-to-earth and patient, and hot without being shallow” (197). Nora’s ability to objectify Shepherd in this manner indicates that she is interested in him only as a distraction from her overwhelming feelings for Charlie. Still, there is more to Shepherd than Nora’s stereotype of him, as he is a structural engineer and Cornell graduate who would be capable of making it in the big city but actively chose rural life.

Shepherd is also a foil and competitor to his cousin, Charlie. Although both men are handsome and intelligent, Shepherd’s ingratiation with Charlie’s adoptive father, Clint, and his love interests Amaya and Nora sharpens Charlie’s sense that he is a misfit, and there is not enough room for him in the town. Charlie especially feels insecure that Shepherd physically resembles Clint and can help him with the manual labor of his construction business, while he can help out only in the feminized role of running the family bookshop. However, while Shepherd fits all the romantic tropes, Charlie emerges as the true hero in Henry’s novel, not just because he wins Nora’s heart but also because of the sacrifices he is willing to make in order to remain in Sunshine Falls and help his family.

Blake Carlisle is the man Libby sets Nora up with on the website Marriage of Minds as an attempt to get her out of the pattern of dating city men. Blake turns out to disappoint Nora’s already low expectations of him, having lied about his height online, being obsessed with hers, and demanding to know whether she can cook his favorite foods. Blake brings out Nora’s insecurity about her height and the fact that men are intimidated by her. However, in a further comic turn, he is revealed to be one of Charlie’s high school bullies. While Blake is a comic exaggeration of a disaster date, he also serves as a foil for Charlie and Nora to have a conversation and get to know each other better.

Amaya is Poppa Squat’s bartender and Charlie’s gorgeous ex-fiancée, a woman Nora misconstrues as a current threat owing to misleading evidence of wistful looks between her and Charlie. She is sleek, blonde Nora’s physical opposite, having thick, dark waves and a “handful of constellation tattoos” and seeming more like someone who “would play a bartender on a sexy soap opera” than a real one (70). Amaya is also down-to-earth and funny, joking about the poor quality of her establishment’s menu. Like Shepherd, she has experienced the big city, having studied in NYU, but prefers a rural existence.

Although Amaya is not Nora’s love rival, she becomes another problem for Charlie and Shepherd to compete over when she begins dating Shepherd after breaking up with Charlie. Amaya also gives Charlie the insecurity that he is boring after she says that being with him would make all the days the same.

Dusty Fielding is the author of Once in a Lifetime and Frigid. Until the epilogue, we only hear about her secondhand, through her manuscripts and correspondence. Still, Dusty is an important instrumental character who brings Charlie and Nora together, as their disagreement over Once in a Lifetime forms the basis of their early interactions, while co-editing Frigid brings them together and enables Charlie to encourage Nora to follow her dream of becoming an editor.

Despite her alleged diffidence and sensitivity, Dusty offers no apology or explanation to Nora about the fact that Nadine Winters resembles her, merely expecting her to get on with reading the book. Still, the job of editing Nadine is important to Nora, as it forces her to think about editing and updating her own character and how she shows up in daily life.

Dusty appears at the end of the novel as a woman in “Coke-bottle glasses” who begins to read her latest work to a rapt audience (372). Her presence here expresses the power of storytelling, both in the novel and in life. The audience’s suspense about what comes next is a metaphor for being present in one’s life, rather than living in the future.

Sally Goode is Charlie’s mother and “looks like a woman who’s spent her life outside,” being freckled all over and smelling of jasmine and marijuana (133). She applies her creativity to everything she touches, including the decoration of the cottage that Nora and Libby stay in. Sally felt that she had to decide between her career as an artist and a stable family life, as she threw herself from one lifestyle into another. While she once went off to Italy to painting, like her daughter, Carina, and had an illustrious New York career like Charlie, she was exhausted by the city and the sexual attentions of a curator who became Charlie’s father and reunited with her former Sunshine Falls sweetheart, Clint.

While Clint accepted Sally and her unborn son wholeheartedly, the conservative residents of Sunshine Falls did not and gossiped behind her back. Her allegedly loose reputation caused both her children to be teased on account of her promiscuity and to seek a place where they felt less confined. Sally’s shame about her past is evident in her discouragement of Charlie’s abandonment of Amaya for New York and her fear that he is making the same mistakes she did.

Although Sally is a warm presence who helps Libby and supports Nora and Charlie’s relationship, her disorganization and her mismanagement of the bookstore create problems for Charlie, who feels that he must be the caregiver where she has failed. Additionally, her rigid notion that Goode Books can only be run by a family member nearly separates Charlie and Nora. However, by the end of the novel, Sally benefits from the increased interaction between Sunshine Falls and New York City, as she begins to paint again and show her work.

Sally’s husband, Clint Lastra, is Charlie’s adoptive father. He works in construction and is eager to take charge of things himself rather than delegate, even though he has had two strokes. While Charlie thinks that Shepherd seems like a truer son to Clint than himself, Clint was always eager to nurture Charlie’s interests, as evidenced in the making of a racecar bed for him when Charlie was interested in cars or procuring books for him when he turned his attention to those. He is insightful enough to know that Charlie will only be happy if he is in a place where he fits in, so he opposes Charlie’s mission to be away from Nora and New York City from the start. He, too, sees that Nora is beneficial for Charlie and that without her, he was living at “half volume” in Sunshine Falls (355).

Nora sees that Clint and Charlie’s responsible natures are similar, even stating that they physically resemble each other in the twitch of their mouths.