When we meet Seattleite Roslyn \u2014 the heroine of Seattle-based author Heather McBreen\u2019s second novel, \u201cSunk in Love,\u201d (out Jan. 27 from Berkley) \u2014 she\u2019s 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\u2019s coping overall after the recent death of her mother.<\/p>\n
Strangely enough, the lying itself isn\u2019t so bad. After all, who among us hasn\u2019t hidden things from our siblings and grandparents to keep the peace? The troubling bit \u2014 and what makes for such delicious tension in the book \u2014 is that Roslyn\u2019s family has invited her and her estranged husband, the much-beloved Liam, on a family cruise.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSunk in Love\u201d is a witty and fun second-chance romance with a hefty dose of forced proximity. Will you be yelling at multiple characters to \u201cJust be honest with each other already?!\u201d Yes. But you\u2019ll 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Roslyn is a med school dropout turned romance novelist. She\u2019s an outlier in her family of overachievers, which includes ER doctor brother Jonah, med student sister Bella and doctor Gramps.<\/p>\n
\u201cRoslyn is really emotional; she feels everything really deeply,\u201d McBreen said during a recent phone call.<\/p>\n
Roslyn\u2019s 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 \u2014 especially to Roslyn\u2019s family \u2014 but there\u2019s a lot more to him than meets the eye.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get teased about this, but I love a messy, broken man who has all this baggage. He\u2019s closed off, but he\u2019ll open up for her eventually,\u201d McBreen said. \u201cWe have to tear down his walls. I\u2019m a sucker for a character like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
McBreen said that while she likes the characters of Roslyn and Liam, she doesn\u2019t think that\u2019s important as a writer.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s great if you write someone you want to get brunch with, but it\u2019s not the ultimate goal,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t need to like the character; I just need to understand (them) and why they did what they did.\u201d<\/p>\n
Roslyn and Liam weren\u2019t perfect when they met. Liam is mostly estranged from his family and refuses to talk to Roslyn about why. Roslyn\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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When Roslyn\u2019s 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\u2019re witnessing them together, pretending to still be happily married on a cruise from Seattle to Hawai\u02bbi.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are a lot of assumptions being made on both sides.<\/p>\n
\u201cLiam has a past that is providing the lens through which he\u2019s going to perceive his relationship with Roslyn. And Roslyn is carrying things from her childhood \u2014 she\u2019s going to see it through the lens of her childhood,\u201d McBreen said. \u201cIt makes that communication harder to have, especially when both of you think the world works a certain way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The assumptions don\u2019t stop between Roslyn and Liam, either. This is the first big vacation the family has taken since Roslyn\u2019s mother\u2019s death, and she feels she\u2019s the only one still wading through deep puddles of grief compared to her siblings, Jonah and Bella.<\/p>\n
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 \u201chappily married\u201d pretense, and places to hide are few and far between.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not the first time McBreen has deployed a \u201cforced proximity through travel\u201d trope (the first being her debut \u201cWedding Dashers”<\/a>), and it\u2019s one she loves.<\/p>\n \u201cI like to see the way the characters can interact with a setting and how it can challenge them,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019ve been living their life a certain way, and now they\u2019re plopped in this new situation. How is this going to push them outside of their comfort zone?\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s relationship is still far from perfect, perfection isn\u2019t the goal.<\/p>\n \u201cHonestly, the thesis of the book is: There is no point where you get to where you solved it, that doesn\u2019t happen,\u201d McBreen said. \u201cA 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.\u201d<\/p>\n