Just You

Very sweet love story

I am kind of over the romance genre of books, as often they are too sappy, too silly, too fraught with ridiculous anxieties and insecurities. If romance novels portray real people, sign me up for the hermit life.

This book, however, this book, is a real love story. A story of two people who work together and hook up at a drunken work party. She doesn’t remember but a few snippets of the night, and hadn’t even been interested in him before then. But the more she thinks about it - the more she considers him as a man - the more she likes him. What follows is a sweet story of friendship, sex, and finally, love.

Just You is touted as an interracial love story, but honestly, it isn’t written that way. There is no obvious skin color comparison or anything like that, and I wasn’t even certain that Portia and Justin are two different races until halfway through the book. Portia and Justin are just two people who fall in love, not a white woman and a black man. They are just people.

Portia is a British society girl, raised in boarding schools and estranged from her family. Justin is an urban New York man, raised by a single mom in the ghetto. Their issues as a couple are more about their upbringings, and their personal baggage related to their early years, rather than the color of either of their skin.

What I found really refreshing was how much they each genuinely liked and admired the other person, for who they were. Social standing, bank account balances, mailing addresses, skin color - none of it actually matters, and it doesn’t matter in this story. Portia’s family judges Justin by what they see when they meet him, but she responds by telling them who he is, and how much she likes him.

There is also very little senseless chatter. The rambling mental dialogues that seem to be standard for New Adult or Young Adult romances aren’t present here. The story is mostly told in the here-and-now, which adds to my reading delight.

That isn’t to say the book is perfect, because it isn’t. There are numerous typos and the punctuation seems to be completely arbitrary. Sentences are ended with question marks, questions are ended with periods, and the commas are all over the place. These are flaws that ordinarily drive me nuts, and will usually ruin my reading experience completely. However, this time I didn’t even care. The power of the story itself overshadows any annoyance I might have normally felt by the punctuation issues. I just ignored the commas and periods, and happily read the words.

There is also a language issue. I am guessing the author is British as she uses British language for both characters even though only Portia is British. No one growing up in the Bronx is going to watch films, go to the cinema, make dinner on a cooker, get sacked, or live in a flat. They would watch a movie, go to the movies, use a stove or oven, get fired, and live in an apartment. But again, totally forgivable because the story is so lovely.

I love this book so much. It is just wonderful. It left me happy for days after I finished reading it, and I started reading it again just to regain that literary happiness.