What's a woman to do when she fails to live up to feminine ideals? It depends on what she's willing to give up in this darkly comic short story by Caroline Kepnes, the bestselling author of You.
Shelby is struggling with parenthood, marriage, a passive-aggressive mother, and unemployment. But she also has a sweet escape in her beloved Hallmark movies. When a secret admirer promises to sweep her away into a world of those same romantic tropes, the temptation is so heady, Shelby can already smell the pumpkin spice. But this rom-com dream has a whiff of conspiracy...
Caroline Kepnes's Sweet Virginia is part of Out of Line, an incisive collection of funny, enraging, and hopeful stories of women's empowerment and escape. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.***
In Shelby's precious Hallmark movies, it's always snowy at Christmas and the woman becomes a softer, superior version of herself as she falls in love with the man.
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(Amazon Original Stories, 1 September 2020, 39 pages, ebook, borrowed from @AmazonKindle, #PrimeReading)
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I have a copy of You on my Kindle which I haven't got around to reading and the TV shows is intense, so I had no idea what to expect from this story. It was a pleasant surprise. The story starts off innocently enough, with bored Shelby dreaming of a better Hallmark movie life finding herself the centre of attention in the shape of flirty text messages and sweet promises for an anonymous stranger. I wondered where the author would take the story and the truth turned out to be much darker than I expected with a whiff of Stephen King and Stepford Wives. This was a treat.
