I picked up “The Beginning of Everything” from the (rather spare) new romance shelf at my local library when I was in to pick up a hold, based largely on the cover, showing a woman with bob-cut hair and bare feet sitting in a comfy chair with a book and looking out the window at a street scene. It looked quiet and cozy, likely to be devoid of overwrought drama and emotion (and a good counterweight to my other current reading, Carson Winter’s “The Psychographist,” which is delightfully overwrought).
And so it was — perhaps a bit too much so.
This is the story of Jess, a woman fleeing an abusive relationship who becomes a squatter in an empty house in a small west Wales town. She’s putting her life back together, with a job washing dishes at a local restaurant and a stack of books from the village library, when Gethin, the man who has recently bought the house, appears, and threatens to upend the precarious haven she’s built for herself.
Gethin himself is leaving a relationship, with a regionally-famous television presenter, and returning to the small town of his youth to reconnect with his past. Instead of kicking Jess out, he offers to let her stay, first in exchange for helping him renovate the house, and then for a modest rent. What follows is a slow and gradual relationship, as landlord and tenant become friends, traveling the Welsh countryside, swapping stories of their pasts, and connecting with Gethin’s old friends. Jess is reticent, though, scarred by her past and unwilling to divulge too much, and also fearful of getting too close to Gethin. In anticipation of what she’s sure is the inevitable end of their happy stasis, she flees again, leaving Gethin’s cozy home for a drafty rental.
There’s really only one external barrier between Jess and Gethin — Gethin’s sister, who’s reasonably suspicious of Jess’s motives — and that falls away pretty quickly. The rest of their obstacles are entirely internal: fear of rejection, fear of repeating the mistakes of the past, fear of misunderstanding. Indeed, the fear of misunderstanding and general inability to communicate openly and honestly is their biggest hurdle: though Gethin is Welsh and Jess is English, they’re both indisputibly British in their stiff-upper-lip resistence to emotional displays.
Overall, I enjoyed this story. The characters are a little older, in their late forties, and have significant miles behind them. The pace is slow, occasionally bogged down in the minutia of furnishing the house they share and their trips to the countryside, but the characters are charming and smart, so spending time in their company is pleasant. I was occasionally frustrated by their inability to communicate, but I’m finding that’s par for the course in the genre: you couldn’t have the “dark night of the soul” for two characters who are clearly in love if they’re able to express their emotions. (The stakes of this miscommunication were quite a bit lower than in “Nora Goes Off Script,” with just some winter discomfort in a drafty rental rather than a desparate chase after a runaway child in Manhattan — I suppose that’s another sign of the essential Britishness of this book.)
Like “Nora,” this is a largely closed-door story as far as the sex goes. Sex occurs, but not in any great detail on the page (unlike in “Love, Theoretically” and some others I’ve read, which get downright raunchy). I’m finding this aspect of the genre interesting, too, in that there’s not much about the packaging that broadcasts the heat level. As a new romance reader, I’m not sure how to know beforehand how much on-page heat a book will have without reading reviews: I didn’t think the cover of “Love, Theoretically” looked that much spicier than “Nora Goes Off Script,” but boy howdy was it ever! “The Beginning of Everything” is in the same heat range as “Nora”: it’s not a “sweet and clean” story by any means, but the mechanics of the sex are much less important than the emotional ramifications.
Fraser has another novel, “The Bookshop of Second Chances,” that sounds like a similarly slow simmer, and which I’m looking forward to picking up soon at my local library branch.