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Tragedy, Romance, and Proper Punctuation in Mary Simses’ The Rules of Love and Grammar
I don’t consider myself an expert when it comes to grammar and punctuation, but like a lot of people it does drive me nuts when I see glaring mistakes in print or on the web. Certainly even highbrow sites now come littered with spelling errors and misuses. Even worse, it seems there’s a growing laissez-faire about the whole thing, not to mention an assumption that if you are working on a Word document and it doesn’t have a squiggly line under it, it must be OK.
Author Mary Simses must have a similar beef. She also might be a savant about grammar rules. If nothing else, the sub-heads on each chapter in her new book, The Rules of Love and Grammar, provide a quick CliffsNotes for anyone who’s forgotten what a gerund, participle, indefinite pronoun, or correlative conjunction is.
But as the title suggests, this is also a book about love and how it affects Grace, a girl who keeps a Sharpie on hand to line-edit store flyers that offer “complementary” services (rather than complimentary.)
We meet Grace just as things aren’t going too well for her. She’s just lost her job as a proofreader for technical manuals, and her Manhattan apartment is in need of major repairs that make it inhabitable. So what else is a girl to do but pack up and head home for some TLC?
In Grace’s case, home is the seaside town of Dorset, Connecticut, where her parents live in the waterfront house she grew up in. Grace, however, is not so keen, having spent precious little time at the house since moving out. The death of her older sister, Renny, from a car crash, on the very night of Grace’s high school prom, has left shadows over the house, her home town, and her relationship with her parents.
But, thanks to serendipity, not only is she back for the duration, there’s also an important event in progress. There just happens to be a big-shot movie director in from L.A., and he’s making a film right there in Dorset, his hometown. And he also happens to be Grace’s high school sweetheart…
If you reckon you see the plot emerging right there, think again. Grace’s journey is not so straightforward, and the issues from the past are not so easy to overcome. For a start, everyone’s own memories of what transpired the night Renny died are neither the same or necessarily accurate. Just what happened, and why?
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Simses (who also wrote The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop and Café) creates a barrel-full of great characters in this book, as well as the picture-book scenery they live in. Grace is something of a Bridget Jones—both endearingly human and fallible, but also heartwarmingly honest and open—with sometimes clumsy, though always well-meant adventures.
The marrying together of the small-town charm, the Hollywood intrusion, the echoes of the past and several luscious love interests will keep you turning the pages. Does Grace find true love with the man she once fell for? Will a hot tinseltown star lure her away? Or does a hometown hunk win the day?
There are certainly plenty of adventures on the way to finding out—as well as some perfectly placed pronouns and prepositions.
The Rules of Love and Grammar is on shelves now.