Synopsis
From the acclaimed author of Beating Heart Baby, an immersive novel following three estranged high schoolers who are pulled into a video game to pursue the disappearance of their friend
Three years ago, Elle (the “E” in the self-proclaimed L.O.V.E. Club) disappeared from Calendula, an affluent Chinese American suburb in inland California. Soon afterward, Liberty and Vera (“L” and “V”) moved away, leaving O alone with her grief, abandonment, and confusion. . . until Liberty and Vera return for their senior year of high school.
Though the L.O.V.E. Club’s three remaining members once bonded as outcasts and gamers, they can’t pick up the pieces of their friendship. But the girls are drawn back to their old clubhouse, where they discover, loaded for them to play, a new game created by none other than the missing Elle.
One click, and Liberty, Vera, and O are ported into Morning Glory, an ever-evolving botanical fantasy coded with their lived experiences, complicated history, and repressed insecurities. Unbeknownst to the others, O can’t remember the events surrounding Elle’s disappearance―but within the game, Elle has sent O a cryptic hint about Morning Glory’s real nature.
While Liberty and Vera defeat increasingly sinister bosses, O grapples with the secret knowledge that her deepest wish, to reunite with Elle, might just come true. But as the girls progress through Morning Glory, O begins to wonder how well she actually knew any of her former best friends and if she’s ready to confront the hard truths―and dangerous revelations―about Elle in her returning memories.
Review
Huge thanks to Flatiron Books for the physical ARC. I love the cover and colors and this was a cool one to receive.
This novel spans genres in a pretty solid and unique way. It’s deeply rooted in grief, with three of four best friends (whose names start with letters that make up The L.O.V.E. Club) dealing with the loss of the fourth. The story is shown through O, and she can’t really remember anything about what happened. That helps the author pepper in some mystery, and also allows for all the cards to not be present on the table at the start. Their love of video games, which is part of what brought them together, is exploited as they are all transported into their lost best friend, E’s, game-world. It kind of brought to mind the sequel/reboot of Jumanji, but that’s where the similarities stopped. That meshes scifi into the otherwise real-world Calendula, California, but then the levels of the video games present an almost fantasy-style layer on top of the settings the characters know from the world. This is also helped by L and V getting a bow and arrow and a sword, too. Then with the grief, and when some of the information about E comes to light, there is a tinge of horror there.
So there were some things in this that just didn’t work for me. While the bulk of this novel takes place in a video game, none of the actual descriptions of the levels felt like a video game to me. If anything, it could have been a portal fantasy and that might have been sold better. O’s gifted power is a notebook, as of course she is a writer. She is able to elicit help from L and V by writing out what they want to do, and while this may have actually been incredibly well done writing (as in an author pretending to write like a high schooler that thought they were a great writer) a lot of it was confusing and wordy, and seriously cringey. There is also a thread throughout about how much E loved flowers. While there is payoff for its inclusion in the end, as someone that doesn’t know about flowers, it felt like a chunk of this book was using descriptors that brought nothing to mind. Flower names used to enhance mentioned colors felt kind of forced and left me confused.
There were also things that continued to reel me in over and over in how well they were done. Calendula is a Chinese American suburb and the author does a great job of painting exactly what that means. The culture bled into everything around them, their intricacies and secrets, the dos and don’ts (if you will) that are (not so) quiet expectations, the challenges of thriving—or even surviving—there. It felt like a perfect glimpse into a world that wasn’t mine, and It was just enough. I’m all for the representation here as well. The layered in grief really hit for me. While the club had each other, E was truly O’s best-best friend. The kind of friendship where it’s hard to tell where one person begins and the other ends. So when she lost her, she just kind or crumbled, lost herself. I also thought it was clever to show how each girl was grieving separately, because each person carries it differently.
Then what really shone are the friendships. This author allows them to be natural, to be hectic, to be anything but cut and dry and nice and neat. They felt real, and every time they have some kind of revelation together I felt for them. The emotion described is powerful and felt almost like a tangible thing you could hold. These friends love each other. They have lost and they have grown. They may never be the same, but that’s still okay. The writing is imbued with a beautiful take on the world, even though their world is not wholly beautiful itself, and I loved the messiness. There are no even lines or comfy finishes here.
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