katekintailbc | Attachments by Rainbow Rowell (Reply)

Attachments
by Rainbow Rowell

I devoured Eleanor & Park and was told this was also worth reading. After my hold came in finally at the library, I began reading this and couldn't put it down. I kept finding excuses to find myself in my bedroom, reading :-)

Like Ealeanor & Park, this is a "period piece" that feels so real it's like I've gone back in time to a time I can remember, though not in so much wonderful detail. This is the story of Lincoln, a young man straight out of college (and college, and college, and college... Lincoln has a bit of a problem resisting degrees) hired to administrate the email at a newspaper. It's 1999 and they just got email; they're also worried about Y2K. So Lincoln works a bit on that problem and he has to read the emails flagged in the system that have certain words in them; he's supposed to send the employees warnings about using their company emails for personal communications. However, he gets sucked into the email conversations between Beth and Jennifer, a movie critic and an editor at the paper.

Also similar to E&P, the story bounces back and forth between Lincoln's POV and the emails exchanged between Beth and Jennifer. Though the emails read like instant messages more than emails, I was instantly sucked into their lives, just like Lincoln did. Jennifer is married and doesn't want children, though her husband does. Or... well, maybe she sort of wants kids. It's terribly realistic, her inner conflict. And there's Beth, whose long-term boyfriend is a musician.

Curious, Lincoln checks out one of the boyfriend's performances. Little by little, he starts to blur the line between what he should and shouldn't do. He knows he shouldn't be reading their emails... but that's exactly what he was hired to do. Meanwhile, he's coping with the fact that his childhood girlfriend dumped him--badly. And he still lives at home with his mother. His friends and his sister all want him to get a life. He feels like he has one. or, well, maybe not one as exciting as Beth's or Jennifer's. Lincoln thinks about approaching one of them.

But then they start discussing him in their emails. And he realizes he can never talk to them, because otherwise they'll know he's read their email, and it's a huge invasion of privacy; he knows too much about them. And they don't know who he is yet, but Beth calls him cute. She's got a boyfriend, though, so she won't approach him. It's a wonderful, layered, complicated relationship between two people who don't ever talk to each other! Sometimes it borders on the unhealthy--but in a silly way or charming way, not so much a stalker way (though I guess that could be a fine line as well).

I fell in love with all the characters, even the ones we only know through their words. I wanted them all to be happy--I wanted that so desperately. I couldn't figure out how it could happen, but I couldn't look away because somehow I knew it had to. And the result was something so sweet and clever and adorable. The book goes deep into these people and shows truths, asks the hard questions, and captures a place and time that is so familiar I might have been living right inside this book.

This was a wonderful book. My review really can't do it justice.