Book Review: Second Chances in Maplewood

Title: Second Chances in Maplewood

Author: Hannah Haywood

Date: 2023

Quote: " 'Hi, I'm Lily,' the young girl responded, eyes shining enthusiastically. 'We just moved in today.'"

Here we go again--Henry, the little girl's father, is "grumpy" because he discourages little Lily from pestering the new neighbor. Ella is nice because she likes to be pestered...

One thing I hate about books is when writers, who tend to be introverts, buy into extrovert social norms when writing for introvert readers. We have our own definitions of "nice" and "cozy" and "friendly." We should stop using the ones that our enemies use against us. We are nice. We are not "grumpy" because we don't encourage annoying instant chummy chitchat from strangers. We are friendly to people who show the qualities of a good friend, beginning with respect for boundaries and going on to include honesty, loyalty, reliability, as well as congeniality. We acknowledge our hormones without letting ourselves be jerked around by them. Extroverts have told us that we're not nice or friendly so many times that some of us, when young, may even believe it, but we need to stop allowing people who are defined, as a group, by a lack of moral sense, to define any words that have even the faintest moral implications. We are nice and cozy and friendly. They are envious.

Ella likes being pestered by Lily because she likes children. That's nice. Sort of. Encouraging children to chatter at strangers is not evidence that a person is fit to be around children...and Ella is, spare and deliver us all, a teacher. In fact she's been assigned to teach the class in which Lily starts the year, which gives her more pretexts for trying to chatter at Henry. Oh, how she loves those hormone highs she feels in his company, though she'd probably feel them in the company of a hundred other men, just as much. (Introverts don't always feel monogamous, but if we learn to enjoy hormone surges as things our bodies do for themselves and get to know people before we give in to our attractions, we can at least commit to acting monogamous. Extroverts seldom can.) But even while she feels that she is or could be in love with Henry, Ella's judging him, setting up her mental timetable for how he needs to change.

Henry's been bullied by extroverts enough that he's not watching for this signal of impending disaster. If close relationships between introverts and extroverts work, this is so not the way. Really, the way our society has coddled extroverts at our expense, a happy marriage to an extrovert probably needs to be hierarchical, the way Joyce Meyer describes her marriage. The extrovert has a defective brain. The introvert partner needs, whether person likes to admit it or not, to commit to a lifetime of training what will inevitably come to seem like an oversized puppy. The extrovert partner should vow to obey, but I'm not sure that that's enough. 

If I married an extrovert I'd want the contract to specify that person agreed to wear a leading chain with both choke and shock collars. One little "You should be" or "You always" or "You never" or "If you could ever"--Buzz!--"I'm sorry I was babbling. I'll lock myself in the closet now." Some people don't think it takes that much drama to break up the pattern where we can't ever be like extroverts enough to satisfy them. I'm not convinced. Most of us like to observe what other people naturally do during the time we spend with them, so we default to letting them take the lead and set the pace. We like peace and friendliness, so we don't tell them when they're starting to become tiresome. I think we need contracts that not only specify that we must pay attention to when we feel that an extrovert companion is becoming tiresome, but specify that the extrovert must agree, without argument, that person is being tiresome and must go and keep perself busy, in the house where person won't be tempted to infidelity, for the rest of the day. Restraining the wretched creature would of course be likely to crush the childish bubble and bounce that seemed so adorable when we met person. At best we would have lost the delightful sprite and gained a not very skillful personal assistant. That was the way an ancient Cherokee tradition was supposed to work--people recognized as spiritual leaders were supposed to marry people of no status whatsoever, either no-talents or foreigners--but I never claimed to be all that spiritual, and the idea has no appeal for me.

Things are so much easier when we work with, live with, and marry people whose manners instinctively please us, who instinctively appreciate us, and who also are more likely to be competent co-workers. 

There are so many ways to write sweet romances, while the basic plot is always exactly the same, that the only criterion by which to compare them is probably whether the relationship, the conversations, etc., have a chance to work in real life. I don't think this one has. People like Henry and Ella marry each other, often, and in these days of no-fault divorces they often divorce in the first year. And if they don't they probably should. 

I don't want to discourage writers, who are mostly introverts themselves, by saying that perpetuating extrovert misunderstandings of how people should behave is a terrible way to write books. If you've not enjoyed harmonious relationships with other self-accepting introverts, you're not ready to write--romances, anyway. You probably write haiku and business letters and even tech manuals well.

So I might as well add that I don't believe the author known as Hannah Haywood even wrote this book, or wrote all of it. A human might write "'Hi,' she responded" if that human had had a teacher who said "Don't repeat 'said'," or if part of the comedy was having the story told by a character like Cher Horowitz who's always trying to use those SAT words in conversation...but in this book some passages, especially the ones about Henry's lawsuit, read like ChatGPT. 

If you think that romance is basically a fantasy genre anyway and at least this book is not one of those "romantasies" where one half of the couple is a vampire or a dragon, you might enjoy this book. I did not, and I don't think "that's just me," either.