Narrated by Erin Mallon
Ryan Carlson is an Iowa boy living in New York city and working as a graphic designer with friends, Diego and Luke, in their jointly owned business. He moved to the big apple with his high school sweetheart but she dumped him and cheated on him with an NBA player so he’s now extremely single and has been for a while. Ryan is a big believer in fate; his parents met in kindergarten and they’re still deeply in love. So, when he sees a pretty girl on the subway one day and feels a connection with her as their eyes meet across the crowded train, he’s convinced they are destined to meet. The Subway Girl wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I thought it would be more about him physically searching for the “subway girl” on trains and meeting people. The blurb itself doesn’t really give much away.
The prologue is about Ryan’s “encounter” on the subway but chapter one starts with Ryan attending the offices of Celebritymonger, a TMZ-style website, to put out a public plea for the subway girl to contact him. My initial reaction to that was not good; all I could think of was that this woman didn’t ask to be the centre of a media storm and the set-up kind of put me in mind of those people who go viral on the internet when someone live-tweets their private conversation. So, it was with some trepidation I continued to listen. Fortunately, the story skirted around those issues and my fears of the subway girl being outed against her will did not eventuate. Still, in real life, I think this kind of publicity wouldn’t have been quite so neatly contained. There were segments of the book which were “comments” from the Celebritymonger website and they did give a fairly realistic (if mostly a little bit kinder) view of what might be said in such a thread and reminded me why it’s rarely a good idea to read the comments.
At Celebritymonger, Ryan meets producer Angie Prince. Angie is a born and raised New Yorker and is very cynical about love and romance. She was raised by a single mother and her most recent ex was a serial cheater. Angie is not very happy working at the trash-gossip site and has dreams of being a serious journalist. However, she is financially stuck at present and her wagon is firmly hitched to Celebritymonger, having been convinced by the site owner to invest in it. The investment was funded by a mortgage on her mother’s house that can only be repaid if Celebritymonger’s ambition to branch out into a weekly TV show occurs. There are meetings scheduled with TV executives for this purpose but they’re looking for much higher web traffic and Celebritymonger’s exclusive deal to search for the subway girl is their ticket.
So, even though Angie has misgivings about her involvement with Ryan’s story, she goes along because her mother’s house is at stake.
Angie and Ryan form a fast friendship over a few weeks and each secretly begins to feel more romantically inclined to the other while the search for the subway girl continues. I’m not a huge fan of the big misunderstanding or miscommunication trope, when an open conversation could save a lot of angst so the section where Angie and Ryan, having had a sexy night together, each believe the other is not interested in anything other than that one night when the truth is precisely the opposite, was frustrating for me.
When the subway girl herself comes into frame things change up again but her personality does not match her looks. I had mixed feelings about this. One the one hand I may have been a bit sad for her that she didn’t end up with the guy if she’d been good and kind. On the other however, it felt like anyone who was a candidate for Ryan’s affections was a terrible person in order to more starkly highlight the differences between them and Angie. (Ryan’s ex-girlfriend has a cameo as well and she’s awful.) I think it might have been more interesting book to me had the subway girl been someone not-terrible – and potentially this could have been easy sequel material too.
The book is billed as a romantic comedy. Humour is extremely subjective so I tend to shy away from the term; that way I don’t feel let down if I don’t laugh and I’m more open to the book, going in without expectations of laughing out loud. There are a lot of cheesy jokes and puns in the book and for readers who enjoy that kind of humour I’m sure it would be very funny. For the most part it fell flat for me however. So my C grade is my response to the comedy (which may say more about me than it) and my C+ is to the book as a contemporary romance.
The narration, by Erin Mallon, was to the usual standard I expect from her; technically well done, with no obvious errors I could spot and a broad range of character voices. There is a bit of a vocal tic Ms. Mallon has which one heard cannot be unheard, where she often seems to end a sentence almost on a sigh. I find if I’m enjoying the book more I notice it less than when a book is not working for me. At various times in this listen, I noticed it a lot and other times, hardly at all.
Ms. Mallon has a nice “hero voice” and it was easy to differentiate Ryan from the other cast members, especially Angie.
Ryan is a genuinely nice guy with “boyfriend material” stamped all over him. He wants nothing more to be in a committed relationship. He enjoys movies, especially romantic comedies, so there are plenty of movie references in the book too – most notably to Lloyd Dobbler’s iconic boombox moment in Say Anything. He didn’t become cheesy (though some of his jokes were) or annoyingly perfect though. There was enough to the rest of him to avoid that. Also, some of his actions near the end of the book tarnished his halo just a little and harkened back to that “things could be fixed easily by a single honest conversation” phase earlier in the book.
The Subway Girl was an okay listen for me. It entertained me sometimes and annoyed or frustrated me at others. I interrupted the listen a few times to listen to podcasts instead which is a sure sign a book isn’t completely holding my interest. However, I didn’t ever feel like I could not continue listening or that it wasn’t worth finishing. I suspect that had the humour been more in my lane I’d have enjoyed the book a lot more however.
Kaetrin
Buy The Subway Girl by Lisa Becker on Amazon
I think I’ll skip this book, but this is a great review and I wanted to say thank you. I agree the part about searching for the girl by posting on a public website seems iffy. It’s a breach of privacy and could end badly, and would have made me uncomfortable when reading the story. I think you and I might have similar opinions of what is humorous, too! Thanks again.
I’m glad you found the helpful Carrie. :)
Great review, Kaetrin. I would feel very uncomfortable about someone going so over the top publicly to find someone they’d locked eyes with. It’s a bit creepy – a bit like like the weirdos on Twitter and Instagram who send random private messages saying “Hi” – I always block immediately.
It could very easily have gone all wrong so yes, it did cause me some discomfort early on! (and I block random DMs on Insta as well. Fortunately I don’t get them on Twitter.)