Field Notes on Love

by Jennifer E Smith

"Utterly romantic." --Jenny Han, NYT bestselling author of To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Two teens are thrown together on a cross-country train trip that will teach them about love, each other, and the futures they can build for themselves in this meet-cute romance from the bestselling author of Windfall and The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight.

It's the perfect idea for a romantic week together: traveling across America by train.

But then Hugo's girlfriend dumps him. Her parting gift: the tickets for their long-planned last-hurrah-before-college trip. Only, it's been booked under her name. Nontransferable, no exceptions.

Mae is still reeling from being rejected from USC's film school. When she stumbles across Hugo's ad for a replacement Margaret Campbell (her full name!), she's certain it's exactly the adventure she needs to shake off her disappointment and jump-start her next film.

A cross-country train trip with a complete stranger might not seem like the best idea. But to Mae and Hugo, both eager to escape their regular lives, it makes perfect sense. What starts as a convenient arrangement soon turns into something more. But when life outside the train catches up to them, can they find a way to keep their feelings for each other from getting derailed?

"One of the loveliest, most touching romances of 2019 thus far that gets at the nature of something deeply uried in all of our hearts." --Entertainment Weekly

• ISBN10: 0399559442
• ISBN13: 9780399559440
• Publish Date: 17 March 2020 (first published 5 March 2019)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Ember
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 288
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780399559440

Reviews

[jen20]

Cute Story about Hugo and Mae. I would have loved to see them travel across other cities together and I would have liked to see more development in regards to their relationship once they got together in person. Even though it didn't feel like insta-love compared to other books, I did feel that their relationship was a bit rushed.

[bookperson]

DNF

[Sam@WLABB]

Rating: 4.5 Stars

I wasn't sure about this one, because Smith's last book fell a little flat for me, but I loved it!

It was so much fun traveling cross country with Mae and Hugo. Both of them were fabulous, and their personal journeys were really interesting and sometimes, really moving. It was beautiful watching Mae opening herself up and Hugo's struggle with his love and loyalty to his family, but also wanting to be his own person was done so well. Some of those interviews with the other passengers really hit me in the feels, and everyone knows I have a thing for grandma's, and Mae's grandmother was a really special lady.

I laughed, I cried (there are even a few tears right now as I write this), and I was left feeling really happy at the end of this book. This is the JES I adore!

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[ccbookwitch]

I’ve honestly never been an *enormous* fan of Jennifer E. Smith’s books, but there have been a couple that I enjoyed, so I decided to give this one a shot. Here are some of my thoughts on it:

I liked the writing style. I don’t always like third person, but I liked how the third person present-tense writing worked with this story. Though I did have issues with the pacing, which I’ll get to momentarily, the present-tense writing did help give the story some momentum, and I thought it fit the theme of travel really well.

I was glad there were two perspectives. I was not a huge fan of Mae because I thought she was pretty boring, so in this case I was happy that there was a second perspective, aka Hugo, to break things up.

I wasn’t actually a huge fan of either character, honestly. I felt like we only know basic things about them, and their character development doesn’t move much beyond them. I guess Mae’s relationship with her grandmother counts for something, but even that felt a little contrived to me for some reason and I wish both of them had more friends or something, even though that wouldn’t have really impacted the story much anyway because they were on a train the whole time. One thing I’ve noticed in Jennifer E. Smith’s books is that I can usually remember the plots of them after a few months, but honestly I never remember the characters. I thought Hugo’s story of being one of sextuplets who were minor celebrities because of their mom’s blog was interesting, but everything he felt and did was kind of how I expected him to think and act. Overall they were just very flat and predictable characters.

I wanted more from the settings. I wish we got to see more of the places they stopped along the train ride. At the beginning, First Margaret talks about stopping at hotels, but that only happens a couple of times in the book, and mostly what we get are descriptions of generic cities, rain, and pizza. I always like reading travel themed books because the settings are usually very interesting, but in this one that was unfortunately not the case and I found it hard to picture the places where they were other than my own knowledge of them.

The pacing was weird. It was mostly slow, and I was expecting it to be a lot faster because of the travel aspect. The romantic pacing made sense to me because the whole point was that they fell in love in their week on the train so that had to move faster than I’d normally like in a romance, but everything else was kind of slow in a way and I found myself feeling like it dragged a lot, especially any of the parts set on the actual train.

Basically, this book fell very flat for me and my final verdict is a resounding MEH. I’m thinking I’ll probably skip Jennifer E. Smith’s future books after this disappointment, which is unfortunate but probably for the best. If you end up reading this book, hopefully you have better luck than I did.