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Perfect Escape

28 Summers is a fun and the much-needed escapist read. It reminds me of fast casual food. I would compare it to brunch at Panera. I pick Panera because it was J's favorite place to hang out with me on Saturday mornings. It was our third-place and we looked forward to it all week. Now that she is away and in college, she thinks about those outings and we both miss that experience.

The book created the same sense of cozy but not fussy and not to too easy either. J and I have picked up fries from a McDonald's drive-through sometimes we wanted a quick snack and were not willing to think to hard about it. This book is not that easy bag of fries - it has a lot more going for it. It is simply begging to be made into a movie. The language has some punch to it and makes effortless word pictures:

They order breakfast in the room each morning. The coffee is rich and fragrant; Jake enjoys hearing his spoon chime against the sides of the bone-china cup. It sounds like privilege. He feels the same way about the French butter, which he paints across the flaky insides of the croissants.

Definitely recommend reading for those times when you want to escape and still learn from the experience. Little gems like this one about the minor acts of love that we don't even see:

Jake folds the omelet over. He gives Mallory the one that is a little superior—with more gooey cheese and more golden-brown onions—and that’s another demonstration of his love. At home, he always takes the better portion because giving it to Ursula would be a waste.

As the story progresses, the cast of characters grows. Many are incidental, don't fortify the main storyline but as in real-life they form the din and chaos of everyday which is full of people who are living their own lives unrelated to yours and meet only by accident and at tangent. At the center of this whole thing is the idea of having found the one and how its over for everyone else at that point:

Mallory loves Jake. Her heart is not transferrable. It has belonged to Jake since the first time he answered the phone in Coop’s room, since the afternoon he stepped off the ferry and onto the dock, since the moment he slid an omelet onto her plate

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