Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Ex & The Single Girl is the story of Portia and the Miz Fallons, a family of three generations of women, all unmarried. Portia is in Syracuse working on her PhD when she is called home by her dramatic mother, Mags, who says she is suffering from back pain. Mags wants Portia back home for the summer to run the family bookstore in Truly, Georgia, with her aunt Vera and grandmother Bev. There is never a mention of familial titles. Vera is never “Aunt Vera.” She’s simply “Vera.” Same with Mags. Not “Mom.” Mags.

Portia drives the long distance down to Georgia and arrives to find her mother in the picture of health and her aunt, mother, and grandmother exchanging weighty glances with one another, conducting a wordless conversation beneath the audible one at every moment.

Not only is her mother healthy and not at all requiring assistance, but they’ve arranged an affair for her to help her get over her failed relationship. Peter, her live-in boyfriend of two years plus, left her suddenly - on Valentine’s Day - by moving out with no warning. And writing a “Dear Portia” note. On the title page. Of his newly-published novel. And leaving it open on the bed. With an Itty-Bitty Booklight holding open the page.

Yeah. Whatta man.

The unmarried (and rumored-to-be unmarriable) Miz Fallons have a specific manner of getting themselves back to happiness: a Flyer. A Flyer is their term for a one night stand (or short-term relationship) that they have no intention of making permanent. And Mags, Vera, and Bev have picked out a Flyer for Portia: visiting writer Ian Beckett - a sexy, handsome Brit renting a neighboring farm while he finishes his book.

For a girl with a Pride and Prejudice fetish so wide she’s reexamining Austen for her dissertation, the sexy British writer man is almost too much to resist. So Portia ends up sliding into the situation, unwilling but curious despite herself, and, during the course of her visit home, evaluates her own attitude toward romance and happily ever after, while revealing several painful longstanding family mysteries.

The core theme of the story focuses on how she learns how to change that attitude. Instead of Pride & Prejudice, we have Attitude and Expectations. Portia has to learn that there’s really no such thing as a one sided situation in a relationship, that nothing is truly one party’s fault. From the smaller, more immediately questions, (Was Peter responsible for their breakup? Was she? ) to the larger issues working back generations in her family, Portia has to find the balance between anger and assuming responsibility, and decide whether to change her own assumptions of how life will proceed, even if no one else around her wants to undertake a similar adjustment.

Ex & The Single Girl is told in an incredibly visual style, which is interesting because it is a first-person narrated story. However, I will spank my own ass if there’s not some talk of optioning for tv or movie production because the narrative itself urges the reader to imagine so much visually that turning it into a script or screenplay would seem like a facile transition.

For one thing, unless there is a section I missed, there’s no concrete description of Portia - which isn’t unusal for a first person narrative. Unless you have the unrealistic moment of the character saying, ‘My brown hair refused to blah blah hair clip mirror blah,’ you don’t have an easy way to determine what a first-person narrator actually looks like. But the reader does see Portia seeing herself in a window reflection and you know she’s got Cheetoh dust smearing all over her wineglass and her hair is staging a protest in all directions, and she’s wearing the official post-breakup uniform of an old flannel bathrobe - but you don’t ever get a moment of description that tells you what she looks like.

So here’s this visual style of writing that lets the picture play out in your brain, but no description of heroine? Fat? Thin? There was no description of her, so the reader can pin not a single assumption of her character’s issues on basic body types.  The reader is free to imagine her in whatever manner. And while that left me a bit at sea when trying to type Portia, it also let me relate to her more easily without assumptions based on image. (And for the record, I never thought Portia looked like overbite girl on the cover. No chance.)

The romance of the story between Portia and Ian is involving as it builds slowly, and is reflected in the various romantic relationships surrounding them, from her aunt, her mother, her best friend, and even her long-absent father.

Ian himself was adorably easy to picture, and Rich managed the balance of creating a character who was both a much more attractive, attentive option to the ex, Peter, but who was also intriguing and not so much a sure thing at every moment. He was clearly the intended hero, but there were times I wasn’t so sure of him and of Portia. He had his own mysteries, and avoided the trap of being that perfect paragon of unrealistic hero-dom who exists solely to support and assist the heroine’s growth (I call this the “Jack Phenomenon,” a la Jack in Titanic).

My disappointment with the book was the setting and the unlikely compactness of the cast of characters in light of that setting. Granted, this is not an epic novel that closely follows several generations, but to set a story in a small town in Georgia would imply a larger group of people with whom the heroine is very familiar, because a small town, once you walk back into it, encloses you with everyone and everything familiar. To reduce the cast of the story to Portia, her three relatives, her best friend, and the partners and romantic interests of those women seems to cheat the setting. Further, the South is itself a personality and a character, and while the characters themselves are well acquainted with Southern charm, hospitality, and indomitable strength, there wasn’t a great deal about the town of Truly to make it clear that it was, indeed, in Georgia.

However, the issues of family, history, and whether you make your own future or whether that future is half-decided by that family and history, make for a charming read. By far the most intelligent and clever element was the recurring theme of “flying:” it’s intriguing and sets the book apart from other predictable contemporary romances. Aside from serving as a euphamism for a casual and satisfying affair with no dangerous long-term attachments or expectations, it’s also a way of questioning what Portia is truly doing throughout the story. Is she flying away from her problems, or flying home? Is she letting those she loves fly away, to see if they return to her of their own volition? Did Peter fly away from her to test her or to test himself? Can she let someone she loves fly away without telling them how they feel, to test their own devotion without taking a risk?

Rich’s skill as a writer is that wonderful balance, from the balance of her characters’ issues and likeability to the balance of the plot threads. This is a book that manages to be a fun read while also exploring visceral concepts of vulnerability, so that by the time I reached the ending, I was invested enough in the character’s happiness to cry and smile over the ending.