Georgie, All Along: An Uplifting and Unforgettable Love Story

Product Information

To an overwhelmed Georgie, the diary’s simple, small-scale ideas are a lifeline – a guidebook for getting started on a new path. It is rare to fall in love with characters at the same pace and to the same depth that they do on the page, but Clayborn's writing is so immersive, so exuberant, it's a truly multisensory experience. Despite this being - in true Kate Clayborn style - an internal book, with lots of inner monologues and thought processes for both MCs in switching POVs, I felt there was not much depth to the characters. While there, Georgie finds her old “friendfic” diary where she detailed all the things she wanted to do as a teenager. I know it’s a simple premise, going home to find yourself and falling for the old school bad boy, but it’s so much more than that, there are so many layers that this story will suck you in and keep you reading till the last page and then leave you bereft when you realise there are no more pages and you have to say goodbye.

However, he has a successful business now, is somewhat antisocial, and is tenderhearted with his dog, Hank. This book is hilarious and moving and sexy, with a focus on strong female friendship, guilt that's hard to let go of, and one of the most realistic, and ultimately romantic, fake fiance´setups I've ever read. That is not going to appeal to me, and I was also constantly confused as to why Georgie kept referring to this journal as "the fic". Instead of finding a new PA job in Los Angeles, Georgie decides to move back home, to a small town in Virginia, to help her best friend, Bel, who is almost ready to give birth to her first baby. When she finds her teenage fiction filled with her younger self's ideas, she sees it as a sign and a new guideline for her future.And something I really appreciated about Georgie, All Along is that - while it inspects and questions and deepens its own relationship to this well-trodden genre staple - you never get the sense that it's looking down on it, or denying why it attracts readers. Both the story and the romance did pick up for me eventually, but by then I think I was 75% in and I had already been too annoyed by most things. so i just finished this book and i'm a bit shell shocked at how good it was so this review is not gonna be coherent at all, more like an unhinged list of all the things that made me fall so hard for this book. But this book … I honestly think there’s a kind of magic in it: the writing is just this perfect balance, I think, reflective of its two protagonists and effortlessly resonant to the reader.

Funny and relatable, I appreciate that this book skips over all the recycled romance tropes in favor of telling an honest story about life and how beautifully imperfect it is.Georgie's plans hit a snag when she comes face to face with an unexpected roommate--Levi Fanning, onetime town troublemaker and current town hermit. That said, I've read this ages before y'all can, I'm so sorry, but this is going to be my favorite romance of 2023. Georgie, All Along is the best kind of love story: one where each character not only finds love, but finds themselves as well. In the realistic and insightful romance novel Georgie, All Along , two people reinvent themselves--and ignite heat in the process. But then Georgie comes across a forgotten artifact—a “friendfic” diary she wrote as a teenager, filled with possibilities she once imagined.

And I think that's exactly what Kate Clayborn does with Georgie and Levi: rather than trying to make them belong in genre-hero-and-heroine boxes, she uses recognizable codes of "romance novel depictions of masculinity/femininity" to create characters, but also deconstruct where those codes are coming from. Levi has been firmly cemented himself as a book boyfriend, the things he thinks about Georgie only rival the things he declares to her. Georgie and Levi are opposites, he’s grumpy and she’s an optimist, but they balance each other out and need each other more than they believe they do at first. Not that it’s really built on mysteries, exactly, (although there’s a bit of “why is Levi so grumpy all the time”) but it genuinely feels like a journey best shared with its characters.

Georgie, All Along is a sweet novel that reminds you going back is sometimes the best path forward…and that planning is never as rewarding as doing. But honestly this was painful in the kind of way that accidentally cutting your nails too short is painful - it hurts, it’s annoying, and you feel really freaking stupid for having done it to yourself.

All in all, this read like a shallow “dramedy” rather than the romantic comedy I expected but this novel failed to realise its potential. And the truth - which I think this book understands - is that on a macro level, we can't ever really do that: go back and do life differently. Needless to say, Georgie, All Along was a big win in my book—the kind of mouth-wateringly swoony romance that burrows deep into my soul and leaves an everlasting mark. Sidebar that nobody asked for: I actually think though that, maybe, while this book starts out with time and "going back" as its major theme, it gently morphs that into being about taking up space and finding place?

The two see their predicament, but respectfully decide to share the place over the course of the next few weeks. The last thing Levi wants, while he’s waiting for the renovations on his own house to be complete, is to be in Georgie’s way, especially when she’s a ball of talkative sunshine while he has trouble conversing with a stranger at the best of times. For most of the book, Levi “ who is very nearly in [his] midthirties” is brooding, angsty, anxious and insecure. He was the town troublemaker when he was young and the older brother of Georgie’s high school crush.