Thornton, Rosy: Crossed Wires

Headline Review © 2009, 352 pages

Peter Kendrick is a charmingly self-effacing Cambridge don who has smashed up his Land Rover's front end at the start of Rosy Thornton's Crossed Wires. The girl behind the phone at his insurance company's call center is Mina Heppenstall, who finds his bumbling and the fact that he'd swerved to avoid a cat charming. From that inauspicious beginning, and after another accident on Peter's part,  a long-distance relationship develops between the two, though they're divided by the telephone wires as well as differences in age and station. But they're situations are otherwise similar: both are single parents--Peter's a widower with twins; Mina, now in her 20's, was pregnant at 17.

The above summary of the book, as well as its rosy cover and the brief description on its back, would lead one to expect a light romance--Hugh Grant as Peter in the movie version, maybe, falling for a younger Meg Ryan type. It is a sweet romance, as it turns out, but much more than that as well. In fact the book is more about parenting than dating. For most of the book Peter and Mina's stories unfold separately, though the two update one another in weekly phone calls. They both have concerns about their children's social development, and both of them wind up facing a similar, more serious problem with their kids in the course of the book. What's nice is that the issues they face are very true-to-life. Their children are good kids whose small crises aren't ripped from the headlines material; their problems are realistic, the sort of thing any parent might face, and thus heartbreaking in the small way kids' problems sometimes are.

Crossed Wires is definitely a good read, deeper than you'd expect and as sweet as its cover suggests.

Comments

[Holly]

1.

I loved this one. It was terrific.