"Dear Mr. Knightley" by Katherine Reay

My goodness, I like each Katherine Reay book I read better than the last.  I liked The Bronte Plot quite a lot.  I liked Lizzy & Jane even better.  But I like Dear Mr. Knightley the best of all.

I think part of this has to do with the heroines' chosen professions.  Lucy buys and sells books and antiques, and while I do buy a lot of books, I don't sell them, and I'm not into antiques.  Lizzy is a chef, and while I love to cook, I don't do it for a living.  But Samantha Moore in Dear Mr. Knightley is a writer, and I'm a writer.  Although she does the journalism thing and I do the fiction thing, I related to that aspect of her character a lot.

However, I also liked this book better because it's inspired by Daddy-Long-Legs, and I enjoyed seeing how Reay updated the idea.  Also, it's somewhat more serious -- Sam is a former foster child struggling to adjust to adult life away from the safety of the group home she lived in through her older teen years and college.  Although a nameless benefactor gives her the money to go to grad school and a nice apartment, she does not have an easy time.  She's socially awkward, has a hard time coping with the rigors of grad school, and finds it hard to distinguish between people who are genuinely nice and kind versus those who are pretending to be nice because they want something.  

This is a more interior, personal book than Reay's two other novels, more about a person's struggles within themselves and less about their interpersonal problems, if that makes sense.  Not saying I don't like books about interpersonal problems, cuz I do, but I liked this even better.

A couple of my blogging friends have said they think it was unrealistic that a guarded person like Sam would have written such intimate thoughts to an unknown person, but I think Reay did a good job setting that up from the beginning with Sam writing passages like, "Honesty is easier when you have no face and no real name.  And honesty, for me, is very easy on paper" (p. 5).  Later, Sam writes, "And now I trust our one-sided, soul-purging relationship.  I depend on it" (p. 130).  Like any epistolary novel, you have to suspend some disbelief because most of us don't write letters that detail full conversations, but my credulity was never stretched beyond comfort.


Favorite Lines:

He showed me the real Kyle, and I crushed him.  Is this the adult I've become? (p. 26).

I've heard all sorts of things about a kiss (melting, fireworks, music), but no one ever told me it's a conversation:  asking, accepting, deciding, inviting, giving... Questions posed and answered (p. 93).

"Talking through stuff before I get it into the manuscript depletes the tension and magic.  I have to keep it compressed or it flops" (p. 218)


If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13.  Sam has a boyfriend who pressures her to spend the night, and they make out several times, though those are not described any more in-depth than the passage above.