Leah
Written on Jul 21, 2011
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? is probably Carroll’s most ambitious novel to date (and she does like to be ‘out there’ with her plots – a re-telling of Cinderella last year, the year before that the girl died and went to heaven but had the chance of coming back, she’s had psychics in her novels…) and it asks the question of can love survive long distance. Can a couple who have been together since they were teenagers survive as Annie finds herself in New York and having all her dreams come true as she stars in a Broadway play whilst Dan has to stay home in Stickens in Ireland because that’s where the couple live. That’s where his family are. His vet’s practice. It’s like a seven-year-itch novel but without the annoying name of it being a seven-year-itch novel. It’s not necessarily that Dan and Annie have fallen out of love with each other, they just don’t know how to be around each other. Annie feels frozen out and alone in Stickens, with a mad mother-in-law and a never-ending circle of visiting neighbours to boot while Dan is always rushing around like a man possessed to be Ireland’s Greatest Ever Vet heck he’s probably going for Ireland’s Greatest Ever Person as he can’t say no to anybody; except Annie.
I love me some long distance love affairs. I loved the idea of Annie and Dan hitting the pause button on their relationship and meeting a year later at Rockefeller center in New York where they got engaged. I think mainly I loved the romance of it all; I love the idea of two people who love each other seeing if the grass is really greener or if it just appears to be greener. Mind you, Annie’s life in Stickens was miserable. I thought Carroll set up Annie’s exit from Ireland beautifully because I could feel how stifled she was with everybody being on top of her and Dan constantly disappointing her. It radiated out of the book. Her need to escape was tangible. I found myself willing her to get the job, willing her to tell everyone where to stick themselves. I wanted Annie to burst out and yell at everyone to leave. her. alone. I wanted to smack Dan for not being there, for being absent. I thought the first half of the book was really fast-paced, despite Annie’s slow-going life. I found myself caught up in it all as Annie desperately hopes to get the Broadway gig. I wanted to see Annie in her natural habitat, which was her being an actress, being on stage, not feeling like an extra in her own life and I thoroughly enjoyed the New York section of the novel.
I did find the characters to be a bit wishy-washy. I liked Annie. I did. But I also wanted her to put Lisa Ledbitter into her place, to be forceful with her mother-in-law yet there was a part of me that understood her deference. Understood her lack of fighting spirit. On the one hand I wanted her to scream and yell but on the other, with everything going on around her I could understand why she just let it all float past her. Whilst in Ireland, Annie was fighting a losing battle, that was for sure. I liked how she came out of her shell in New York. How she was able to shake off the shackles and come to life more. I found the girls around her who were also in the play to be fascinating, too. I wasn’t a big fan of Liz. Well, let me re-phrase. I liked Liz. Until she went off the rails. Then I didn’t care what happened to her and I did, truly, honestly, get frustrated with how Annie made excuses for her. I didn’t find the redeeming features in Liz that Annie saw, let’s put it that way. Alex, Blythe and Chris are the other girls in Wedding Belles and I would have liked to have seen more of them, especially Blythe (if there was a movie made of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Betty White would be Blythe). I didn’t like many of the people back in Ireland, in Stickens. Except for Jules they all needed a slap! I loved Jules. And although most of the time I did want to shake Dan and tell him to wake up and smell the cow poo, I did want him to succeed; I did want him to realise what he was doing was wrong, that he was driving Annie further away every time he let her down.
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, on the whole, was an enjoyable read. I don’t have any major quibbles and for the most part Carroll is a brilliant writer who’s really great at making us care for her characters, particularly Annie. I did get a bit frustrated at her continual use of certain words: “Christ Alive”, “Anyroadup” (If I had heard anyroadup on more time!), “Anyway” and how “ice cold” Jack Gordon’s hands were and how “blonde” her apartment was. It was very repetitive, and it took all my might not to get annoyed at just how many times “anyroadup” began a paragraph. I don’t even know what the word means; I presume it’s basically another way of saying “anyway”, but I may be wrong. Claudia Carroll is an author I enjoy, even making me laugh at certain points of the novel, which is a rarity (honestly, you have no idea how many novels promise to be “hilarious” or “witty” and don’t even make me crack a smile and let it be known I am the easiest person ever to make laugh). I was never entirely sure, either, how the novel would end, as Annie found life in New York quite exciting and well, you answer me this: How many people would swap NY for Stickens? I liked that the ending wasn’t entirely fluid, that I wasn’t sure which way it would go. I’m very much looking forward to Claudia’s next novel (and going back to read her others, particularly If This Is Paradise I Want My Money Back).