When we meet Seattleite Roslyn — the heroine of Seattle-based author Heather McBreen’s second novel, “Sunk in Love,” (out Jan. 27 from Berkley) — she’s in crisis. While picking her way through terrible lasagna at an uncomfortable family dinner, we find out Roslyn is not only lying about her happy marriage, but the status of her writing career, and just how well she’s coping overall after the recent death of her mother.
Strangely enough, the lying itself isn’t so bad. After all, who among us hasn’t hidden things from our siblings and grandparents to keep the peace? The troubling bit — and what makes for such delicious tension in the book — is that Roslyn’s family has invited her and her estranged husband, the much-beloved Liam, on a family cruise.
Now Roslyn has a choice to make. Come clean to her family about her (perceived) failures in life, or persuade Liam to join her on one last adventure before they sign the divorce papers.
“Sunk in Love” is a witty and fun second-chance romance with a hefty dose of forced proximity. Will you be yelling at multiple characters to “Just be honest with each other already?!” Yes. But you’ll also be eagerly turning the pages to see not only if Roslyn and Liam can come back to each other, but if Roslyn and her family can work through their communication issues and come to a deeper understanding of each other.
Roslyn is a med school dropout turned romance novelist. She’s an outlier in her family of overachievers, which includes ER doctor brother Jonah, med student sister Bella and doctor Gramps.
“Roslyn is really emotional; she feels everything really deeply,” McBreen said during a recent phone call.
Roslyn’s husband, Liam, is a British-born doctor who met Roslyn in college. They have an immediate attraction on a blind date, falling quickly in love. Driven, smart and responsible, Liam seems perfect on the surface — especially to Roslyn’s family — but there’s a lot more to him than meets the eye.
“I get teased about this, but I love a messy, broken man who has all this baggage. He’s closed off, but he’ll open up for her eventually,” McBreen said. “We have to tear down his walls. I’m a sucker for a character like that.”
McBreen said that while she likes the characters of Roslyn and Liam, she doesn’t think that’s important as a writer.
“It’s great if you write someone you want to get brunch with, but it’s not the ultimate goal,” she said. “I don’t need to like the character; I just need to understand (them) and why they did what they did.”
Roslyn and Liam weren’t perfect when they met. Liam is mostly estranged from his family and refuses to talk to Roslyn about why. Roslyn’s mother was a flighty romantic who consistently put boyfriends before Roslyn and her two half-siblings, something that has deeply affected her own relationships in life.
When Roslyn’s mother dies, she can no longer write, and grief threatens to swallow her whole. Instead of grieving together, she and Liam grow apart, and through smart use of flashback chapters, we see exactly how screwed up everything got to be at the same time we’re witnessing them together, pretending to still be happily married on a cruise from Seattle to Hawaiʻi.
There are a lot of assumptions being made on both sides.
“Liam has a past that is providing the lens through which he’s going to perceive his relationship with Roslyn. And Roslyn is carrying things from her childhood — she’s going to see it through the lens of her childhood,” McBreen said. “It makes that communication harder to have, especially when both of you think the world works a certain way.”
The assumptions don’t stop between Roslyn and Liam, either. This is the first big vacation the family has taken since Roslyn’s mother’s death, and she feels she’s the only one still wading through deep puddles of grief compared to her siblings, Jonah and Bella.
What ratchets up the tension even further is that all these opportunities for clarification and communication are happening while at sea on a cruise ship, dotting around the Hawaiian islands. Roslyn and Liam have to share a room (with one bed, squee!) to keep up their “happily married” pretense, and places to hide are few and far between.
It’s not the first time McBreen has deployed a “forced proximity through travel” trope (the first being her debut “Wedding Dashers”), and it’s one she loves.
“I like to see the way the characters can interact with a setting and how it can challenge them,” she said. “They’ve been living their life a certain way, and now they’re plopped in this new situation. How is this going to push them outside of their comfort zone?”
The setting turns out to be just what they need to push through all their misplaced perceptions, and after grand gestures on both sides, we arrive in a place that feels much, much better than the one we started in. Still, much like life, McBreen admits that while Liam and Roslyn’s relationship is still far from perfect, perfection isn’t the goal.
“Honestly, the thesis of the book is: There is no point where you get to where you solved it, that doesn’t happen,” McBreen said. “A relationship is this ever-growing, ever-changing lesson that has to be learned over and over again. You never learn it, you just have to keep working to learn it.”
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