Story for the Week
I am old enough to remember when making a long-distance call would cost a small fortune. You’d call someone and preface the conversation with, “I’m calling long-distance from…” to ensure that whoever answered understood that it would be expensive to wait on hold. When I was in high school, I dated someone who lived about 30 minutes away. Since neither of us paid our family phone bills, we spent a lot of time writing letters instead of calling, which meant we spent a lot of time not talking to one another. (Good thing we were both editors on our respective school newspapers and actually enjoyed writing. 📝)
Even when mobile phones first became widespread, people made most of their calls on weekends and in the evenings because that was when calls were unlimited. In today’s world, when so many carriers advertise unlimited talk, text, and data, with inexpensive international plans, it makes it easy to stay in touch.
We have so many ways to connect with one another around the world. I probably never would have ended up marrying my husband if there weren’t. And new ones are popping up all the time, especially in light of the current pandemic. I use video chats daily at work. My daughter does Zoom video conferences for confirmation class and keeps in touch with her friends on Facetime (for hours and hours and hours 😄). My husband’s family has started a Zoom video call with a number of friends and family. Outside of video options, we regularly use texting, emailing, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and there are likely at least a dozen other texting and messaging apps that I don’t even know about.
With so many ways to communicate, it really does increase the ability to begin and maintain a long-distance relationship. That’s supposed to be the theme of this book by Jenny Colgan.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐
3 Stars for 500 Miles from You by Jenny Colgan
432 pages
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Publication Date: June 9, 2020
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and William Morrow Paperbacks in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher’s Description
Lissa, is a nurse in a gritty, hectic London neighborhood. Always terribly competent and good at keeping it all together, she’s been suffering quietly with PTSD after helping to save the victim of a shocking crime. Her supervisor quietly arranges for Lissa to spend a few months doing a much less demanding job in the little town of Kirrinfeif in the Scottish Highlands, hoping that the change of scenery will help her heal. Lissa will be swapping places with Cormac, an Army veteran who’s Kirrinfeif’s easygoing nurse/paramedic/all-purpose medical man. Lissa’s never experienced small-town life, and Cormac’s never spent more than a day in a big city, but it seems like a swap that would do them both some good.
In London, the gentle Cormac is a fish out of the water; in Kirrinfief, the dynamic Lissa finds it hard to adjust to the quiet. But these two strangers are now in constant contact, taking over each other’s patients, endlessly emailing about anything and everything. Lissa and Cormac discover a new depth of feeling…for their profession and for each other.
But what will happen when Lissa and Cormac finally meet…?
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Main Characters:
- Lissa – real name is Alyssa (although not necessary), she is a nurse in London suffering from PTSD after witnessing a crime against a friend. She is assigned a job swap/secondment to Scotland.
- Cormac – a nurse/paramedic in the small town of Kirrinfeif where life moves a lot slower, everyone knows everyone. He is offered the job swap/secondment to London as Lissa’s replacement.
- Kim-Ange – Lissa’s best friend who lives in an apartment across the hall. She takes Cormac under her wing while he’s in London.
- Jake – Cormac’s best friend, also a paramedic, who agrees to keep an eye on Lissa while she is in Scotland.
I didn’t realize when I started Jenny Colgan’s 500 Miles from You that it’s actually the third book in her Scottish Bookstore series. I found out when I read the other reviews that Nina and Zoe, also transplants to Kirrinfeif, were the main characters in the first two novels. This one works as a stand-alone, which I appreciate as a reader. I suspect that there will be future books about Kim-Ange and Jake and perhaps Cormac’s relative Larissa who also lives in London and takes him out to the hottest clubs and Yazzie who Cormac casually dates while in London. (Side note: This was an advance copy when I read it, so I hope the author went with a different name for Larissa in the final version as it is much too close to “Lissa,” and she’s a minor character in this story.)
When I finished this, I was thinking of giving it 2 stars, but as I thought about the review, I realized there is a lot to like about Lissa and Cormac’s story. Lissa’s PTSD and the way it manifests feel very real. She finds herself unable to focus at work, she has a hard time talking about what she witnessed, she struggles with the personal attachment she had to the victim and his family, and she feels like she’s being punished by being sent to Kirrinfeif. In reality, her boss seems to genuinely give her a chance to heal away from where everything took place.
Cormac embraces the opportunity to practice in London for several weeks. In a way, he also becomes a victim of Lissa’s PTSD because she takes out her “punishment” on Cormac—not sharing notes about patients, not leaving him any information about his responsibilities, being terse with him in her communications. Cormac is friendly and goes out of his way to engage in conversation with the people he meets, much like he did at home, but he finds that people tend to be more isolated and cautious with strangers in London, much like in any big city. Nevertheless, when he feels like he offends Kim-Ange, he attempts to make amends by paying her a visit with chocolate, which opens the door for friendship between the two.
What I like about this book is the way the author describes the scenery and the “tone” of the different locations. The scenes in London are fast-paced, without color, with almost a staccato feel, while the scenes in Kirrinfeif are slow and filled with greenery and flowers, and people move at their own pace. Lissa’s journey comes full circle, and the secondment in Kirrinfeif is exactly what she needs to heal and learn what she really wants.
What knocks it down for me is the romance aspect. I know that people can fall in love long-distance. That’s exactly how my own relationship with my husband started, so it happens. It works. But we don’t actually get to see much of that in this story. Lissa and Cormac have a handful of interactions via messaging for work and then by text, but we never get to see them develop that relationship. We never really see them falling for each other. They have exchanges about their respective patients with tidbits thrown in that show they’re starting to develop a friendship, but we don’t get to see it turn into more than that.
We get told near the end of the book that they’re thinking about each other. If this book is meant to be a romance, I want to see the romance. Give me more of the text messages, emails, maybe a phone conversation, thinking about each other before they go to sleep at night. We don’t get any of that here, and that was a disappointment for me.
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