Book Review: The Words We Lost

Title: The Words We Lost 

Author: Nicole Deese

Date: 2023

Publisher: Bethany House

ISBN: ISBN 978-1-4934-4071-9

Quote: "Every tap, tap, tap of my editorial director’s blood-red fingernail against her ceramic coffee mug feels like another second closer to the death of my career."

Ingrid's biggest current problem is a superordinate who sees her as competition. She's had bigger ones, though. The father who raised her alone, a heavy-drinking sea captain, died at sea while she was at school. Her only serious crush was on her best girl friend's cousin Joel; it was mutual, but they've been estranged because she blamed him for her father's death. And then, within the past year, her friend, Cece, died. /Cece was also a novelist whose work Ingrid had been editing; she'd written a five-volume series, the first four books of which had been bestsellers, and died without sending Ingrid the manuscript for volume five. Now Ingrid's hostile boss, who's started spelling her name "SaBrina" possibly in hopes of reducing references to Sabrina the Midlife Itch, is threatening to have Ingrid fired if Ingrid can't find or write volume five. She has two weeks.

Cece died of a brain tumor, which is ironic given the intelligence she put into making Ingrid's search for her last manuscript a treasure hunt that will bring Ingrid and Joel back together. That's even despite the fact that Cece's celebrity status had upset her widowed mother, Wendy, who Ingrid thinks has lost "forty or fifty pounds" as people don't leave her alone to mourn. 

It's a romance; it doesn't have to be plausible in real life. I'm not convinced that there are friends as good as Cece, nor that, if there were, they'd have mothers as weak as Wendy, nor that a prize like Joel would have been monogamous into their late twenties, but romance readers are stereotyped as willing to suspend disbelief. 

What you'll love, if you're the kind of romance reader who will like this book, are the vividly drawn background ("Fog Harbor," a fictionalized small town on the Pacific coast), the niceness of the three friends, the way everyone except possibly SaBrina is a serious Christian so nobody preaches at anybody, the wholesome pace of a romance that grows as the characters develop appreciation of each other's characters, and the tragic heroism that unfolds as Ingrid and Joel find out what Cece knew about Ingrid's father. 

What's not to love? "Romantic" has traditionally been an opposite to "realistic," in literary terms. Some people prefer realistic novels.