REVIEW: Into the Blue by Emma Brodie
I’m not sure how this book ended up on my reading device. It’s not the sort of book I read these days, but something made me open it up and once I started reading I was drawn in.
Into the Blue opens in 2013 in New York – AJ Graves is preparing for the last performance of the two-person show she’s starring in with Noah Drew. Noah is apparently a famous actor and former People’s Sexiest Man Alive (I may have rolled my eyes here). The show is half-scripted, half improv (weird to me, but I am no expert on New York theater).
Before the show, AJ and Noah engage in some loaded and portentous banter, and then the story shifts back to Massachusetts in 2000. AJ is finishing her junior year of high school and working in a video store – a video store where Noah Drew, scion of a famous acting family, also lands a job.
AJ is a soccer player whose dreams of a scholarship to NYU are more-or-less dashed by an inconvenient broken arm (she had plans to spend the summer in soccer intensives scouted by college coaches). AJ loves her family – she has four siblings, including her twin Emily, who has Downs Syndrome – but she dreams of New York and a different life. Besides family and soccer, AJ’s main interest is a short-lived 1964 TV series called Astronauticals – a sort of extra-cheesy improvised space opera with a cult following. The day Noah is hired, he notices the Astronautical fan fiction open on AJ’s computer screen. The fan fic happens to feature a character called Glimmette – who was portrayed in the show by Noah’s aunt, Eudora, who he is staying with in the present day.
AJ hates Noah on sight because he’s handsome and broody and – she suspects – also pretentious and full of himself. But one day he reveals that he, too, is a fan of Astronauticals, and just like that, a friendship is born.
Suddenly, AJ’s terrible summer becomes a lot better. Noah introduces her to Eudora, and Eudora takes it upon herself to teach AJ and Noah improvisation. Noah is in town because his mother is sick with a mysterious illness. AJ wants to be a comedy writer, and the proximity to Eudora and her connection to AJ’s beloved Astronauticals is thrilling to AJ. Spending so much time with Noah becomes equally appealing.
I will admit that I initially wasn’t into the improv angle; no offense to any improv enthusiasts. Into the Blue did a good job of depicting the creative intricacy of improv, and also showing how practicing together strengthened the bond between AJ and Noah.
But after sharing their first kiss, Noah ghosts AJ and leaves town. Bewildered, AJ goes to see Eudora, and the older woman cruelly dismisses her.
In 2007, AJ is living in New York and working on an HGTV show as an associate story producer. AJ channels her improv energy into Upright Citizens Brigade (very prestigious!) and writing spec scripts and sketches. Her goal is to write for Saturday Night Live. AJ is busy with work and doesn’t have much of a personal life, which I found an annoyingly trite way of keeping the heroine in suspended animation until the hero reappears.
Which Noah does, showing up at UCB and participating in improv sketches. Of course, he’s a movie star now, and seems to want to make some sort of amends for how it ended with AJ, but he’s also still frustratingly elusive. AJ’s life then takes a surprising turn that puts her in even closer proximity to Noah, and they do have an emotional breakthrough, but Noah ultimately leaves again.
The story continues in this way, episodic, with Noah repeatedly dropping into AJ’s life, upending things, and then dropping out. When he finally shares the reason for his behavior, I thought it was a better reason than you often see in this sort of story. I could see it as a real barrier to the the HEA. But it doesn’t explain or excuse why, if he thinks they can’t be together, he doesn’t just STAY AWAY from AJ.
Into the Blue reminded me strongly of a writer I used to read, Kathleen Gilles Seidel. Seidel had a writing style that I was somewhat ambivalent about – there was a sincerity, an earnestness to her writing that I found simultaneously refreshing and…kind of corny? I felt the same way about Into the Blue at times. Part of it is that there is an immersion in a particular world – that of improv – and the way it’s depicted is very earnest and yes, a little corny to me.
Into the Blue ultimately had some big pluses and not quite as big minuses for me. The pluses: strong writing, an engaging plot (I liked the fact that the story spanned years), and a really likeable heroine. AJ is smart and a good person, but also believably flawed (over the years there are times when she deals with stress and heartbreak by drinking; given that her father is an alcoholic this is concerning). I liked how fresh the story felt – there was little that felt cliched.
Which brings me to the biggest minus – and a walking cliché: Noah.
Noah would be so much more likable and interesting to me if he weren’t so totally a central-casting bad boy “hero” who manages to “-est” his way through everything he does.
“-est” is my long-time designation for the romance hero who just happens to be the sexiest, smartest, handsomest, bestest at whatever he does – acting in Noah’s case – and who everyone universally admires and adores. I guess it’s another name for a Marty Stu, very much focusing on how he wins at EVERYTHING. Noah would – just by a hair – beat Usain Bolt in a footrace and Magnus Carlsen in a chess match. I’m not a fan of -est heroes. They’re irritating to me and they don’t feel real.
Noah also manages to evince some attitudes that remind me of the bad old days of romance, as when he talks about banging models in LA before coming back home to live with Eudora:
“Those girls…their eyes are dead.”
Poor Noah, forced to have lots of sex with hot, dead-eyed girls.
The problem with not loving Noah is that I didn’t love Noah and AJ together. I wasn’t invested in the HEA. I liked a lot of other things about the story, and that made up for it, to a great degree. But I wish the hero had been fresher; this unique story deserved it. My grade for Into the Blue is a B+.
Best,
Jennie
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Hmm, I just brought brought this home from the library yesterday, so it was fun to see this here today. I just peeked at your review, Jennie, as I don’t want to spoil the reading of the book. Thanks for sharing your review.
I liked this one too! I can see the comparison to Kathleen Gilles Seidel. They do share that earnestness and also the close focus on profession. The Seidel book I was most reminded of was Till the Stars Fall, which also has the characters meeting as teens and one of them becoming a celebrity (a rock singer, in his case). We also, in both books, (kind of spoilerish) see the FMC in a relationship with someone other than the MMC at one point. And as with Seidel’s romances, Into the Blue had a melancholy feel.
The biggest area where they differed was, to me, the sex scenes. Seidel’s were less detailed and less torrid, for want of a better adjective. But though they were longer and more detailed, the sex scenes in Into the Blue didn’t really feel sexy to me. I’m not sure why, but they felt like they belonged in a different book.
One of the things that impressed me here was that when Noah started ghosting AJ, crushing her teenage heart and her budding acting career in one fell swoop, I thought his reason for it wouldn’t stand up to the trauma his actions caused her. He didn’t just ghost her, he didn’t explain WHY he was ghosting her. I couldn’t come up with an excuse for that myself. But when we find out why, I thought his reason was excellent, much better than anything I could have anticipated.
I suppose you are right that Noah was a Marty Stu, but I couldn’t view him completely that way because his life wasn’t charmed. Yes, he was graced with a lot, but he was also cursed, and that made him (through not fault of his own) less of a brass ring for the girl who got him, which made him feel less like a trophy. I gauge the Marty Stuishness of romance MMCs partly in that light. I also saw Noah’s many successes as an outgrowth of the other thing; he was driven to work his ass off because he couldn’t (or wouldn’t let himself) have AJ and other good things. In my reading he didn’t stay completely away from her because he couldn’t let go of his feelings for her.
Because of all that, I didn’t actually see him as a bad boy at all. Every time he was described as a bad boy, I rolled my eyes, because he was such a good boy. To his mom and Eudora, but also beyond that. He had a lot of decency.
I do agree, though, that AJ was the more original and interesting character of the two. I liked how flawed she was. My favorite parts of her stoy actually had to do with someone else she dated. That part of the story stuck with me more than the rest. That section made me thing of Emily Giffin’s books, actually.
Re the improv — I did some improv in my youth and I Loved it. I thought that certain aspects of how it was described were very true to the reality, such as the fact that so much depends on what your scene partner(s) does/do – the story is like a living, evolving hot potato that you keep throwing and catching and immediately throwing back. With that said, the training that AJ and Noah did under Eudora’s tutleage resulted in a mystical bond that was so much mumbo-jumbo in my eyes. And since I’ve done improv, I couldn’t suspend my disbelief that such a bond would emerge from improv exercises.
What genre would you stick this book in, Jennie? The romance is at the center of it but it plays out differently than in many romances, so I can’t quite say.
If you like this book, I HIGHLY recommend The View was Exhausting by Mikaela Clements and Onjuli Datta. It’s a truly excellent book that has none of the earnestness, but all of the romance, drama, career stuff, and flawed characters Into the Blue has.
@Kareni: I hope you like it!
@Janine: I think the point about the melancholy vibe is spot on. It sounds like the author’s previous book is similar and maybe would even be more similar to Till the Stars Fall.
I kind of know what you mean about the sex scenes, maybe because they took a while to come (no pun intended) and the h/h’s early romance felt almost weirdly chaste?
I do agree that he had a good reason for not wanting a relationship with AJ – I just don’t agree that he couldn’t tell her why earlier.
Thanks for the insight into improv – the mystical bond did feel over the top to me, but I didn’t know enough about the process to say for sure.
I would call this a romance, but what makes it a special romance is that it’s so much more meaty and sweeping in scope than a lot of romances. I actually go back and forth between a B+ and an A-. What grade would you give it, Janine?
I did read The View was Exhausting a few years ago at your suggestion – I remember I liked it a lot! It had a similar feel as a romance – a lot more substance and really interesting characters.
@Jennie: Sorry to take so long to reply to this comment.
I think you might be right about the sex scenes. They didn’t mesh with the rest of the book.
Re Noah not telling AJ why he didn’t want a relationship — I don’t think she would have taken no for an answer if he’d told her the reason when she was seventeen and in love. And I don’t think he was equipped to deal with that, in the midst of losing his mother. He was pretty young himself. IMO he made the right decision. I agree that he could have told her a few years later, probably sooner than he did. But at this point their relationship had been over for a long time, so I don’t think he was obliged to. Calling her out of the blue and telling her would have opened up a lot of emotions and for what? As far as he knew she had gotten over him and moved on.
Grade — I think I would give it a B+ also. I agree too that it’s a romance but it wasn’t published as one. That’s part of the reason I compared it to The View was Exhausting – they were both romances with depth, substance, and epic scope that were published as mainstream fiction. I wonder how many more romances like these are out there that I don’t hear about because of how they are categorized.
@Janine: I guess I see your point about not telling her, though I still think it’s more “right” in a fiction sense than a real-world sense. In the real world, no one knows how much time they will be given, and especially when one has a fatal illness. So giving up years you could spend with your one true love is just foolish, IMO.
@Jennie: Yes I agree with that. That’s my general feeling about the “I’m staying away from her for her own good” trope — I think we discussed it once in our review of Jem’s story in the Psy/Changeling anthology. He couldn’t have (biological) kids and his partner (I forgot her name already) really wanted them so he broke up with her and for years didn’t tell her why. I often dislike this trope because grownups should be allowed to make their own choices as to what’s good for them.
It worked better for me here because AJ was not quite a grownup and also because I felt Noah was being self protective, not just protective of AJ. I also don’t think he felt they could spend those years together. Some of it was pride, IMO.
@Janine: I think those are good points – the self protection and the pride are better reasons for me.
Are you going to read more Emma Brodie books, Jennie? I would love to know your opinions of her previous book and any others that might follow this one.
@Janine: I think I might pick up the previous book – the description is intriguing.
Sorry I’m late to the party. I’ve heard good things about this book. I also saw a thread on Reddit about the book where the reader was annoyed by the ending and didn’t feel it was a HEA. I read the spoiler comments so I know why – though I won’t say here. Did you feel [redacted] cast a pall over the ending Jennie? (The audiobook is narrated by Julia Whelan so I’m going to listen to it anyway – I’ve aready decided I can regard the ending as at least a HFN and write (in my own head canon – if I care enough – a full HEA. :) ) But I’m curious. You and Janine both called it a romance so I’m assuming you feel similarly, if not more so?
@Kaetrin: I really didn’t think the spoiler had too much of a negative affect on the HEA – without saying too much, I feel like the issue had been sort of dealt with and it was the best HEA available to them? So I was fine with it. I do think of it as a romance, albeit not a conventional romance.
@Kaetrin: I read it as an HFN. It ended with the main characters together and in a good place. And it was clear that if they had forced themselves to go separate ways neither one would have been able to move on and they’d have both been miserable.
I was so into this book. When the sex scenes started, I just fast forwarded the first few, but then it became ALL about the sex. I’m sorry, I prefer when authors leave something to the imagination. I don’t need to know every anatomical detail. I finally had to give up n the book. That stinks, because I really loved the story line.
@Annie Coffey: I remember being surprised when the first sex scene hit, because the story had been pretty chaste before that point (I guess because AJ was only 17). I didn’t feel like there were so, so many sex scenes later but I might be forgetting some; I do tend to skim them these days.
40% in and I am so bored out of my mind.. but you have written an excellent review!! Thank you! I think your review is the encouragement I needed to finish this book.. used my last audible credit and got the audiobook.. hope Julia Whelan helps me..
I am reading for AJ.. I really like her character…and I totally agree with your analysis..
@M: I hope it gets better for you! The author definitely has a particular style so I can see how it wouldn’t be for everyone.