Review: Your Perfect Year by Charlotte Lucas

 

Your Perfect Year is a German romance novel by Charlotte Lucas (pen name of Wiebka Lorenz). The 480-page novel was translated into English by Alison Layland, whose translation never once felt to me as if I were reading something translated from the original German; she did a remarkable job here. Romance is not a genre I read very much of at all, so I was surprised that I completed such a long one. What kept me reading was the mysterious journal/day planner that becomes the hook around which all the action and character development of the novel centers. 

Jonathan Grief (just look at his surname if you want a clue to his personality) is not an easy guy to be around. He's 42 years old, divorced, lives alone, and is terribly bored by the publishing business his more-senile-every-day father has placed into his hands. Too, Jonathan is a creature of habit, the kind of man who runs for exercise every day no matter how terrible the weather may be. That's why he's running near the river bank early on New Year's Day in such a nasty rain - and that's why he sort of resents the intrusion into his personal life of having someone hang an expensive year-long day planner on his bicycle's handlebars when he isn't looking. 

Now exactly what is he supposed to do with that?

It is only after Jonathan explores the diary a little more that he starts to wonder why it was left for him to find the way it was. And when he notices that all 365 days are already filled in with suggestions for the day, and that the handwriting resembles that of his mother whom he hasn't seen in decades, Jonathan finds himself wanting to believe that someone may have prepared the book specifically for him. 

All Jonathan knows on day-one is that someone identified only as "H" is apparently the person who filled the day planner with exercises, suggestions, and appointment times. Almost as a game with himself, Jonathan begins to follow the writer's suggestions, and now the game truly is on. All he can think about is finding the mysterious "H"...at first just intending to return the day planner, but eventually to ask a whole bunch of questions that are driving him crazy.

I'm going to round my 2.5-star rating of Your Perfect Year up to a full three stars because of the simple fact that it managed to keep me reading for almost 500 pages of "romance." The plotting is both complicated, and well executed enough, that I kept reading to the end so that I could satisfy my curiosity about where this all was going to end up. Sometimes, though, I thought the plotting got a little bit too "cute," what with all the near-misses that started to happen between "H" and Jonathan. The best compliment I can give Your Perfect Year is that it would have made a great eighties movie starring the young Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. I'm just not much into stories like those anymore, but I suspect that a whole lot of readers are going to love this one. And they should.