Love Is a Canoe
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Love Is a Canoe is a smart, funny and romantic novel about the fragility of love and marriage.
Peter Herman is something of a folk hero. Marriage Is a Canoe, his decades-old guide to love and relationships, won the hearts of hopeful romantics and desperate cynics alike.
But now it's 2010, and his wife has just died. He passes time with a woman he admires but doesn't love—and he begins to question the advice he's doled out for decades.
Then he receives a call from Stella, an ambitious young editor who wants to celebrate the anniversary of Marriage Is a Canoe with a contest for struggling couples. The prize? An afternoon with Peter and a chance to save their relationship.
The contest ensnares Stella in the opaque politics of her publishing house, and introduces a cast of unlikely and unstable couples. Then there's Peter, who must discover what he meant when he wrote Marriage Is a Canoe if he is going to find a way to love again.
Ben Schrank is the president and publisher of Razorbill, a Penguin imprint that is home to many award-winning and New York Times bestselling books for children and young adults. He is also the author of the novels Consent and Miracle Man. He grew up in Brooklyn where he lives with his wife and son.
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'Schrank has done something here that may sound impossible: He’s written a funny novel about publishing that is not caustic but optimistic, not biting but bighearted.' New York Times
'Sharply funny, beautifully original.' Kate Christensen, author of The Austral and The Great Man
'Funny, tender, wholly original—it's as if all the good fairies came to its christening. (Story, dialogue, character, heart.) I loved it.' Laura Lippman, author of And When She Was Good and The Most Dangerous Thing
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Three stories of personal and literary authenticity weave through this novel of love and books that gets sharper and smarter as it progresses. Forty years ago, Peter Herman penned Love Is a Canoe, a memoir and meditation on marriage that retains a devoted following. Canoe's homilies from Peter's adolescent summer spent in upstate New York with his grandparents as his own parents' marriage crumbled contain a certain enduring quality: "A good marriage is a canoe it needs care and isn't meant to hold too much no more than two adults and a couple of kids." But as the recently widowed author ponders the course of his marriage and current relationship, straining against late-middle age, there's a danger that his personal and literary fictions will unravel. The danger grows acute when Stella, a young book editor trying to spur sales on Canoe's 40th anniversary, creates a contest for a couple in trouble; winners will spend an afternoon with the somewhat reclusive author in the hopes that their troubled relationship will be rescued. But as Emily and Eli Corelli, a young Brooklyn couple with a rocky marriage, enter Peter's orbit, they, Peter, and Stella confront the underlying truths of their lives. The honesty doled out as events unspool is bracing and frank, and give these characters added depth and wisdom. This is the third novel from Schrank (after Miracle Man), president and publisher of Razorbill.
