Review: A double-chocolate cake delicious and satisfying read!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 23, 2013
GWYNNETH EVER AFTER is promoted as "Notting Hill with the roles reversed", with a clumsy-but-charming single mother with three young kids from Canada taking the role of Hugh Grant's clumsy-but-charming bookstore owner from Notting Hill.This is like comparing a family-recipe chocolate chunk cookie the size of one's hand to a double-chocolate cake with white chocolate shavings and fresh raspberries. Yes, both desserts have the same basic ingredients (butter, flour, eggs, chocolate, and sugar) but they're in different categories, a spectrum apart.Please forgive any spoilers that may be extracted from the rest of this review, but by the comparison to the movie, we already know the plotline, and it colors the experience of reading the story. I was almost sidelined (because, for me, anything that starts out with "This is like..." tends to be a disappointment--either the people try too hard to replicate the former success, or I automatically filter everything in the new creation against what I enjoyed from the last one, and I miss out on the flavors that are unique). But out of professional curiosity, I picked up the book, and I'm glad I did.After analyzing both the film and the book, I've decided the comparison is unjust, and hopefully in future marketing campaigns, it is done away with.GWYNNETH EVER AFTER is double-chocolate cake and doesn't need to fall back on a chocolate chunk cookie, no matter how delicious the dessert.I adored Notting Hill - putting Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant together, in a movie by the same team that brought us Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, what's not to love?But GWYNNETH EVER AFTER only has the same basic ingredients - a seemingly ordinary person has a chance meeting with a Hollywood mega star in an unexpected place, and their relationship develops over the refreshingly normal things (coffee, family dinners, conversations we usually take for granted) and then the budding romance is threatened by the hazards of fame and the complications that are to be expected in a life where nothing actually belongs to you--not your heart, your past, or the things you try to build under the microscopic eye of the paparazzi. The climax in the movie, and in the book, are also similar - a crew of friends and family joining together to bring the wayward lovers back together, and declarations made publicly to ensure a happily ever after.However, the textures and flavors of the book and movie are quite dissimilar. For one, instead of a wacky flatmate as in Notting Hill, we have the sensible best friend/older sister, and instead of a group of adult family and friends assembling behind the hero, we have three quite adorable children, a burly cousin and a long-lost daughter (and an ex-wife, whose reason to aid her ex I have yet to understand).The conclusion is slightly different. I felt the book had an unlikely declaration and it seemed a tad abrupt, whereas the movie gave us snapshots of a future that left everything on a nice note.GWYNNETH EVER AFTER is also a romance novel, so we can go behind bedroom doors and experience the romance (and the points of view of both characters) in a much deeper way than we could in a movie. Film has soundtrack, scenery and the delicate expressions and pregnant silences that can't quite be achieved in writing, just as the book opens up a whole universe where we can escape, for just a while, into someone else's daydream, someone else's dilemma, and bring to it something of ourselves.Reviewed by JCCelestefor TheRomanceReviews.com