Attachments

by Rainbow Rowell

It's 1999 and for the staff of one newspaper office, the internet is still a novelty. By day, two young women, Beth and Jennifer, spend their hours emailing each other, discussing in hilarious detail every aspect of their lives, from love troubles to family dramas. And by night, Lincoln, a shy, lonely IT guy spends his hours reading every exchange. At first their emails offer a welcome diversion, but as Lincoln unwittingly becomes drawn into their lives, the more he reads, the more he finds himself falling for one of them. By the time Lincoln realizes just how head-over-heels he really is, it's way too late to introduce himself. What would he say to her? 'Hi, I'm the guy who reads your e-mail - and also, I think I love you'. After a series of close encounters, Lincoln decides it's time to muster the courage to follow his heart ...and find out whether there really is such a thing as love before first-sight. Heartwarming, witty and unforgettable, ATTACHMENTS is an irresistible romantic comedy that has it all.

• ISBN10: 0525951989
• ISBN13: 9780525951988
• Publish Date: 14 April 2011 (first published 1 April 2011)
• Publish Status: Remaindered
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Dutton Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 336
• Language: English

Reviews

[bearley]

As someone who hasn’t read a rom-com in a a few years this reignited my love for them!!!

[bgsbooks18]

This was a cute story but I found it a little weird with him reading the emails. I can see why he did because Beth had this amazing way with words. Her and her friend Jennifer was so funny. Sometimes I would find myself laughing at some of the times they would talk about in the work email. Beth had an amazing personality. I would say this was an okay book.

[alindstadtcorbeax]

Star Rating: 3.5 Stars

RTC?

[jamiereadthis]

Cute and… cute. A whole lot of cuteness. Which means the things that bugged me just might highlight my own issues instead of the book’s. Basically, how is Chris needing space to himself a bad thing? The jobless boyfriend that we’re supposed to scorn actually works hard, and is smart and kind and loyal, and by the end of the book he’s the one I’d want to spend time with. His declaration to Beth is close to my ideal declaration, and Lincoln’s would make me run for the hills. (“No air in space”? What does that even mean? And no thanks!)

The happy ending means that two needy people can go be needy together, and Chris (whew) escapes the vortex. Is that not the book I was supposed to read? Oops. In my book, there’s a difference between a crush and real love, and no amount of Tom Hanks speeches can turn one into the other.

But that’s just me. And it’s still cute. Aw, Y2K.

[mrs_mander_reads]

Rainbow Rowell does it again. A completely intoxicating story that just makes me want to kiss fictional characters on the mouth.
Read this. ❤️

[manonblackbeak]

i

[Sarah Says]

I am seriously fan girl-ing right now, I just went and followed all Rowell’s social medias so I could stalk her, umm I mean see what book she has coming out next.

I was in love with this book by the first few pages. I think this is the fastest I’ve ever devoured a book. I got the book that morning and read it all that day. That’s a new record for me. (i’m writing this review two days later). I came up for air, once, to put up a Goodreads update – Page 48: Loving this book and thinking “why have I not read any Rainbow Rowell until now”.

I finished the book late-ish Friday night – Page 322: Love Love Loved this book. I’m jumping up and down and smiling, LOVED IT – review to come :-). I only open it it intending to have a look and reading it later when I was on holidays. Just the first few pages had me hooked and I didn’t go to bed until I’d finished it. I loved Rowell’s writing, her humour, snappy dialogue and devour-able prose.

The Main Characters: Lincoln O’Neill, Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder; I love them all and they are now my imaginary best friends :-P what I wouldn’t give to have a working friendship like Beth and Jennifer’s. The characters are all 28 (my age) and it’s nice to see other people not having there s**t together. It’s a funny, heart-warming story that feels real. My favorite books usually involve magic, mythological or paranormal creatures, but Rowell’s left me feeling happier than any book has in a long time. I was smiling like I’d just won the lotto when I finished the last page.

The story swaps between Lincoln “page shots” of Beth and Jennifer’s emails and Lincoln in the 3rd person. The story is set back in 1999/2000, the whole point being that people didn’t have iPhones etc. back then so we see the two female leads converse using inter office email. Then there is the poor smuck Lincoln that has to monitor those inter office emails. At this time 1999/2000 I was in high school and they did monitor your computer use, I know this because I got in trouble off the librarian once for some “inappropriate” story I was writing.

The girls are immediately like-able. But for me Lincoln became the star of the show. He was lonely and stuck in a rut. He hated his dead end job that made him feel like a perverse nut job. Now I can see why some people mightn’t like this, they might write Lincoln off as a creepy loser. But I love how we get to watch him grow, watch him try to be a better person and succeed. He gets out of his rut, he gets his s**t together and he gets the girl, the right girl! Go Lincoln Go!

I love Lincoln, yeah so what if he fell for Beth while reading her emails –Ah hello, he gave Jennifer his MacDonald’s while he changed her flat tyre in a storm, super hero! – Beth did some Lincoln stalking as well, so meh, all’s fair in love and war. I did some house drive by stalking when I was younger LOL and he married me, my husband the silly man.

So Five Stars. I’m going to leave it at that because if I try to tell you anymore about the story I’ll give it all away.

[celinenyx]

Since everyone has been raving lately about Ms Rowell's work, I thought I would give it a shot. Her young-adult novels didn't very much appeal to me, so I picked up Attachments in a Kindle sale. This review contains some mild spoilers towards the story.

Lincoln has to read through the emails of the paper he works at. Jennifer and Beth's conversations tend to get flagged often, and he gets caught up in their lives, and eventually becomes infatuated.

Romance books and movies often walk this fine line between adorable and creepy. Attachments, sadly, fell into the creepy category. Lincoln is weird, awkward, and falls in love with a woman whose emails he has been reading for months. At night, when most of the newspaper peoples have gone home, he likes to go to her work station and sit behind her desk. Whee-ooo-whee-ooo, STALKER ALERT.

Beth isn't much better. Even though she has a boyfriend, she follows Lincoln around only because she thinks he's cute. She obsesses over him and tries to catch glimpses of him. For all she knows he could be a complete ass-hat, but for some reason she thinks he looks nice, and that's reason enough to act like an idiot.

I had a hard time believing Lincoln and Beth were actual adults. If it wasn't for the fact that Beth really wants to get married, you could easily replace them with teens, and turn the office into a school. At one point they actually come face to face, but instead of Beth talking to the guy she has been interested in for weeks, she just smiles and goes off. Really? You're an adult, and that's your reaction? On top of that, Lincoln still lives with his mom, only sits in a chair all day and eats a lot, yet somehow he's not fat. Right.

The form of the novel is nice, a combination of Lincoln's point of view and the email conversations of Beth and Jennifer. The writing is decent enough, but nothing to write home about. Throughout the book I was vaguely entertained and slightly repulsed at the same time. There was nothing very offensive in Attachments, but nothing profound either.

[journalingirl]

Why I read it?:

I love Rainbow Rowell and want to read all of her books.

What I thought of it?:

I’m used to Rowell books being about teenagers and college age kids, so it was interesting to see a book set from the adult perspective. The plot is something I had never seen before and is definitely because of the modern age. At sometimes it felt a little invasive because the premise of the story concerns someone reading another person’s email. The book had a great ending and I really enjoyed it.

[girlinthepages]

Attachments is the first adult novel by Rowell that I’ve read, and the second I’ve read by her (I adored Fangirl) and I’ve found that Rowell has a way of writing a great contemporary with layers of feeling and emotion subtly laced throughout. She doesn’t have to hit you over the head with the depth to her characters, rather she lets you in bit by bit, letting readers find empathy with ordinary characters, relating to the struggles, emotions, and desires of the average person that most of us go through (I felt this way with Cath in Fangirl, and with Lincoln in Attachments).

This book reminded me a lot of some earlier 2000s adult contemporary reads by Meg Cabot, such as Every Boy’s Got One and The Boy Next Door. Set at the turn of Y2K, it was a lot of fun reading and reminiscing on how things were at the end of the 90s and how new everyone was to the concept of email and the internet (and thus many were paranoid about internet security). The email format between Beth and Jennifer stayed consistent throughout the book, intermixed with narrative passage’s from Lincoln’s perspective. I loved this format for this story because it really felt like you as a reader were monitoring the emails as Lincoln, and were able to get to know both women’s characters solely through their online communication, as does Lincoln. It was a fun way to structure the narrative and gave me some nostalgia for when email was this shiny new concept and authors were super trendy for using the format in their contemporary novels.

What I really liked about Attachments is that each of the three main characters is struggling with a different stage of life at the onset of their thirties, and is still trying to establish themselves as an “adult.” From Lincoln, who lives with his feminist, anti-establishment, yet Betty Corocker-esque constantly cooking mother to Beth who has moved out on her own yet is still supporting her college sweetheart’s band aspirations to Jennifer who is married but still as terrified of pregnancy and motherhood as any sixteen year old, each of the characters acknowledges that just because they have “big-kid” jobs and are in their late twenties and considered more or less “adults” does not mean they have their lives figured out yet. And I have to tell you, this is refreshing to read as a twenty-something and continued some of the coming-of-age themes in YA and NA, which is fantastic, because who really has their entire lives figured out by the time that they’re thirty? I also loved Rowell’s knack for writing colorful secondary characters who may be in the background but add so much fun to the story, such as Doris the vending machine lady who is the first to befriend Lincoln to his D&D group members to the insufferable yet smoldering Chris.

Overall: While I enjoyed Attachments as a quick and fun read, it’s didn’t irrevocably change me as a reader or have me yearning for more (hence the 3 star rating- I enjoyed it and it was pleasant but it’s not a new all-time-favorite). It was a cute, insightful contemporary and a nice break from YA fiction, and supports my belief that I’ll enjoy anything that Rowell writes.