A pair of students spend a day together in Toronto, fall in love instantly, and agree to meet up at the girl's home in Muskoka a year later, but he stands her up, and then they randomly run into each other again ten years later. Will they be able to trust again? Will all the hot, hot sex they're having be worth the potential heartbreak? Will we ever find out why he stood her up, and will that explanation be satisfactory? The answers to the first three questions were "yes," obviously, since it's a romance novel. Alas, as far as I was concerned, the answer to the last was, "no."

I'm not nearly heterosexual enough for this book. That isn't something I say about a lot of m/f romances, but for whatever reason this one pinged all the wrong ways. (While at the same time I could hardly put it down, because I had to know what happened!) Three-hundred pages of plot could've been resolved in forty pages with the barest amount of communication. I didn't really buy the romance, especially as it seemed to rest almost entirely on the heroine lusting after the hero, which lust was stated about twice a page.

I often like romance, m/f romance included, and certainly don't feel that being a genre novel should've excluded it from consideration for an award, but this one didn't work for me. Honestly, and I hate to say this as it makes me sound like an anti-genre snob, but I would probably have liked the book more if it had been litfic, and the two of them ending up together wasn't a foregone conclusion (or indeed didn't happen at all). That might've allowed the relationship room to breathe and maybe have some nuance.

This last I'm including because this made the Canada Reads shortlist: The theme this year is about resilience, and I do think that this book fits with that. Much of the plot concerns trying to figure out who you are after you've compromised your original life plans. As with every other short-listed book this year, a lot of it is about the grief following the recent death of a loved one, and figuring what to do without them. I think all four other books do it better, but it is on theme. Another point that I probably wouldn't mention outside of the context of this award: I don't believe diversity in and of itself qualifies or disqualifies a work for Canada Reads. Ducks won last year, and I was happy to see it. However, if this is a book "all of Canada should read" it does feel very white and very straight and very Ontario cottage country, and just *sighs*