Today, Fable and the Verbivore are thrilled to share our May book club episode! This month we focused on the romance genre and chose as our read the hilarious and delightful Would Like to Meet by Rachel Winters.

The story of Would Like to Meet revolves around the heroine Evie’s many attempts to create a successful real-life meet cute, so that she can inspire a client at the struggling film agency she works for out of a writing funk – hoping to spark an idea that will help him to finally finsh his long delayed Romantic Comedy script. To us, this book read like a humorous love letter to rom coms and those that enjoy watching and reading them - while also challenging and even subverting some of the antiquated tropes in the genre.

In this episode, we talk about how the author contrasted the ridiculous and occasionally over the top meet cutes sequences with layered characters and subtle moments that felt human and relatable. There are also several key pieces of Evie’s history that are hinted at, but are left to unfold naturally over time which setup some fantastic reveals.  

Towards the end, we talk about how on theme the chapter openings were with the location and secondary scene headings setting the stage for the action as you would typically find in a screenplay. It was a brilliant way to establish the location and situation, so that the story could just jump directly into the meat of the moments .

We hope you enjoy this episode! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

Would Like to Meet is Rachel Winters debut novel which released in December ‘19. Rachel currently lives in London, and in addition to being a fiction writer she has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, and is currently a Senior Commisioning Editor with Gollancz publishing house. She is also active on Instagram as @Frostycheeks1 and on Twitter as @FrostyCheeks, we’d highly recommend checking out her funny and delightful posts.

Books Mentioned:

• Would Like to Meet by Rachel Winters

Movies Mentioned:

• Bridget Jones's Diary

• You’ve Got Mail

• Sleepless in Seattle

• The Wedding Planner

• The Holiday

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
’Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)