Attachments

My rating: 3 to 3.5 stars out of 5.

My first encounter with Rainbow Rowell was with Eleanor and Park, which left me wanting and needing more. When I started reading this book, I said to myself, “please…please give me more and don’t end like Eleanor and Park.”  Whenever I have a not-so-good first encounter with an author, I am always reluctant to read another book by them. Rainbow Rowell still has me questioning if I will read another. I keep thinking, maybe it will be my “John Green” moment when I had read Looking for Alaska and almost missed out on the amazingness of The Fault in Our Stars. This doesn’t completely seem to be the case. Even as I am writing this, I have this weird appreciation for Rainbow Rowell as an author.

Like most people who allow themselves to be sucked into a story, I can want it to end a specific way, and then hope as I read it that it will end that way. I don’t like being tricked and sent for all sorts of loops and turns to get from point A to point Z….okay, that is a lie…I actually love that. I love when a book can make me anxious and speed through because I HAVE to know if it ends how I want it. Even if it doesn’t, that doesn’t upset me as much as a book that just kind of ends with no ending. I can happily report that Attachments does have an ending, for the sake of spoilers, I won’t say whether it is a good one or a bad one.

During most of the story, I started feeling dread. I started feeling like it would totally be like Rainbow Rowell to write an entire book about this guy whose job is to READ other people’s email and the whole story is just that with little to no interaction with ANYONE at his job. That he would read the same two people’s email for MONTHS never once not reading it (because he should have stopped it a long time ago since the email was getting flagged in the first place) and never do anything about it. Then, I got to thinking about all the other background information. How messed up Lincoln’s life had become, and how he kept enclosing in on himself. I did enjoy seeing the growth Lincoln went through in the story. This got me to thinking how in the hell would this woman, who by only reading her emails alone, that he fell in love with, would react if she found out that he should have and could have stopped reading her email to her friend/co-worker from the very beginning of the story at the first flagged email. Then I started thinking of the endless possibilities that this story could take on, and which one I wanted, and how I just needed it to end.

So as I write this, I feel this sudden conflict. Like I had a Rainbow Rowell epiphany. Rainbow Rowell isn’t like a lot of other authors. She won’t necessarily give you the ending you want, or maybe she will. She shows the growth of all of her characters, whether they had small roles, or were the main role. She tries to weave real life situations into the backdrop of the story. Knowing this, and understanding this, I just didn’t care for this book. I seriously just pushed through it to get done with it and see if it got better. And the fact that I was bored out of my mind up until about 90% into the story, which is just too long to get into a story. So, even though I can fully appreciate Rainbow Rowell as an author with this sudden new understanding, I just didn’t like this particular work. The plus side is, at least it ended and didn’t leave this empty space in my soul where Rowell just tore my heart to shreds and didn’t even care (like she did with Eleanor and Park).