Waiting for Tom Hanks by Kerry Winfrey

Narrated by Rachel L. Jacobs

I’m a big fan of romantic comedy movies and who doesn’t love Tom Hanks?? Unfortunately, Waiting for Tom Hanks wasn’t quite When Harry Met Sally. I found it fairly slow-paced, with the Hanks and Nora Ephron motifs overused. And there was one thing that made me spitting mad. But more about that later.

Annie Cassidy is a twenty-something single woman living in Columbus, Ohio with her Uncle Don in a beautiful old house in Germantown which was originally owned by her mother. Annie’s mother died when Annie was in high school and that’s when Uncle Don moved in. Annie’s dad died when Annie was only a baby, so she doesn’t have any memories of him. But the family lore is that her parents had a once-in-a-lifetime kind of love – the kind of love one finds in romantic comedies. Annie and her mother used to watch all of the 1990s romcoms all the time. It was their thing. They are now Annie’s way of staying connected to her mother. Because I saw them that way, I had a little more patience for this quirk of hers than perhaps I otherwise would have.

She is literally waiting for a Tom Hanks character from a romcom. She’s expecting meet-cutes and other cues found in her favourite movies and will not settle for anything less. She has a framed picture of Nora Ephron in her bedroom, for goodness sake.

Annie is also an aspiring screenwriter and is writing her own romcom, loosely based on her best friend, Chloe, a barista, and Nick, the owner of Nick’s Coffee Shop where Chloe works and where Annie hangs out. Chloe and Nick have that snarky banter thing going which every romance lover knows means they belong together. (These two are delightful for the most part; when they’re together they steal the scene.)

As it happens, there is a romcom being filmed in Columbus and because reasons, Annie gets a job as the assistant (mostly this involves getting coffee) for the director. This puts her in the orbit of Drew Danforth, the male lead. Annie does not think of Drew as remotely Tom Hanks-like and is inclined (very unfairly) to dislike him from the start. She constantly imputes bad motives to obviously friendly overtures on Drew’s part. It very quickly became a wearing. Drew was a really nice guy and put up with a lot from Annie. Exactly why I didn’t always (or often) understand.

Annie’s naïveté was a little too unbelievable at times. It was just too cutesy for her to be constantly narrating her own romcom. She also did some really foolish things and made some moves which made little sense to me. And, after she and Drew eventually get together (strictly fade to black, alas) their black moment comes about because of something she does which was just egregious and I was furious with her. She didn’t grovel nearly enough and Drew forgave her way to easily. What Annie did was such a breach of trust and privacy. It was just not okay on any level. For that alone, the book content dropped from a C to a C-.

There were some fun things about the story. I liked the crew at the coffee shop; Chloe, Nick, Tobin and Gary. For me most of the humour came from them, although sometimes Annie had an amusing turn of thought which made me chuckle. Uncle Don was a sweetheart and I appreciated that his love of collectibles, SFF and D&D was, for the most part, not mocked, or, if it was, it was fond and not mean.

I also appreciated that there was some commentary about the overwhelming whiteness of romcoms, particularly from the 90s and that the movie (which was shot in only TWO WEEKS??) Drew was filming was an interracial romance. There were also mentions of films such as The Big Sick, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before and Crazy Rich Asians as current exemplars of more diverse romcoms.

The description of Nick is a little ambivalent but it seemed to me he wasn’t white and I also appreciated the sexual diversity with various queer representation in the cast as well.

The story is fairly simple and it got bogged down for me with a lot of filler and internal navel-gazing. I ended up speeding up the audiobook to 1.25x speed just to get things moving. Any faster and the narrator sounded too much like a chipmunk and her acting performance was basically lost but I thought her pacing was just a little bit slow on 1x speed. It wasn’t just the story.

Listening to Rachel L. Jacobs was otherwise a pleasant experience; she had a good range of character voices and did well with the emotion of the plot. I liked that Chloe sounded different to Annie and her depiction of “stoner” Tobin made me laugh.

One thing I noticed, which may or may not be an issue for listeners, is that Ms. Jacobs most often says “romantic comedy” as two distinct words instead of the more common run-on “romanticomedy”. I noticed it because it felt a little forced; like, that isn’t how people commonly speak even though her pronunciation was technically correct. It’s a little thing and didn’t really affect my enjoyment but it was something I noticed.

Waiting for Tom Hanks was a little too meta for me but it had the bones of a good story in there. I felt like it needed a severe pruning though and I’m still not over what Annie did to Drew – honestly this was just not sufficiently addressed in the text. I’d certainly be happy to listen to Ms. Jacobs again but I’m not sure whether I’ll try Ms. Winfrey’s next book. Then again, I understand it’s Chloe and Nick’s story and they were some of the most successful parts of this book for me so… maybe?

Kaetrin

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