Love Is a Canoe
A Novel
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, Ben Schrank’s Love Is a Canoe is a smart, funny, romantic, and hugely satisfying novel about the fragility of human relationships and a heartwarming reminder of what it really means to be good to those we love.
The author of a classic self-help guide to love and relationships, Peter Herman has won the hearts of romantics and cynics alike. But decades have passed since Marriage Is a Canoe was published and a recently widowed Peter begins to question his own advice.
Much to his chagrin, he receives a call from Stella Petrovic, an ambitious young editor in New York City who forces him to reconsider his life’s work, not to mention the full force of his delusions. The book’s fiftieth anniversary is approaching, and Petrovic has devised a contest to promote the new edition. The prize? The chance for the winning couple—a pair of outwardly happy Brooklynites named Emily and Eli—to save their relationship by spending a weekend with the reclusive author.
If Peter is going to help the contest’s winners, he must discover what he meant when he wrote Marriage Is a Canoe—and also find a way for himself to love again…
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.
