The first thing that got me about Ruthie Knox’s amazing ALONG CAME TROUBLE was the voice of the heroine, Ellen.
Ellen’s brother is an internationally famous pop star, but like all brothers, he complicates her life by doing stuff like falling in love with her neighbor in idyllic Camelot, OH so that the paparazzi are crawling around smashing her landscaping. Ellen is an attorney, but she’s a real attorney; she spends most of her time working with the twisty complexities of entertainment contracts. Ellen is a mom; she’s a single mom, and she’s at that stage of momhood where her toddler son demands that she witness his every breath and he can’t use pronouns and he’s left her with mom belly (by the way, Ellen, I call this my “empty baby house” so as to rest the blame on the baby).
Ellen is smart, and resourceful, and clever and she loves her annoying brother and her crazy baby and the life she’s made for herself from her own ideals—beauty, peace, good neighbors, family.
This is such a hard thing to do—peel your sweet baby from your hip long enough to force the work of a week into four hours of babysitting while cultivating a life you actually want to live when you’ve gotten just enough work done, and your baby back from the sitter. Ellen loves her backyard, and to sit in it, and to go on walks with her neighbor, and to take her kid to ice cream in her pretty how town.
Those loves are important when your ex-husband is a selfish alcoholic, not evil, just ordinary selfish and ordinary alcoholism, and you still want your son to know him. Those loves are important when the simple dreams of your own life have been a bit crowded by your family’s dreams for your brother. Those loves are important, and worth protecting, when every complicated part of your life seems determined to uproot and crush those loves.
This is where so many of us have been, at a place in our lives where we feel confident and clever and loving but have realized that to keep this place, we have to fight. There is no destination, some orderly list we can accomplish so that we are left in peace to motor our porch swings on pretty summer evenings. There is only the daily fight of getting there. Making it one day. Not quite making it the next.
This, all of this, was what worked its way inside my ear when I started reading ALONG CAME TROUBLE. Oh Ellen, I thought. I know you.
Writers are supposed to visit trouble on their characters, and in Ellen’s case, we might think her troubles are the ones getting stirred up by her brother’s next door romance and resulting media storm. Or maybe her ex-husband’s latest attempts at inebriated fatherhood. Or even the daily plate-spinning cluster of working motherhood.
But it’s Caleb, beautiful, tries-to-fix-everything Caleb, who is Ellen’s trouble.
Ruthie Knox, above all the many darling things that embody her, is a matchmaker. She’s among the best at characterizing her heroes and heroines so that no matter how absolutely terrible they are for each other in theory, when you put them together—no one else would ever, ever do for the other. This is the gift of the matchmaker: matchmakers do not work by theories and algorithms. Matchmakers jumble around in the very bottoms of the lovers’ soul trunks and pull out all the pieces they thought they weren’t using and show them how well all these crazy pieces everyone else tossed away fit together.
It’s completely delicious, that. The slow assemblage of love from rusty parts, ill-used parts, broken parts.
It’s classic Ruthie Knox. It’s Ellen and her idealism meeting Caleb and his fierce loyalty, and the utter misfit of that, but underneath is the clink and snick of more important little pieces finding their mate for the first time—until there is something for Ellen’s idealism to rest on, and something to focus Caleb’s loyalty.
You’re going to love Ellen. You’re going to love ALONG CAME TROUBLE.
Also, I love Ellen so much, I made her a little Pinterest board! It’s very adorkable.
Tell me about a time you’ve played matchmaker, or comment about anything at all, really, and I’ll pick two random commenters to win copies in their preferred format of ALONG CAME TROUBLE. I’ll draw the winners out of a hat on Monday, March 11th, which is ALONG CAME TROUBLE’s release date!
I’ll draw a winner at 5 p.m. US EST time on March 11, 2013!
CONTEST CLOSED Congrats to Claudia and Jenni! Check your inboxes.