Save as Draft

by Cavanaugh Lee

[Leah]

One of my favourite ways for novels to be written is via email. I know lots of people think it’s not entirely possible to write a novel via email and make us care for the characters, or to keep the plot flowing, but I’m personally a big fan. They’re always such super-quick reads and if the author is good enough, you can make a novel from emails work. Cavanaugh Lee hits it out of the park with Save As Draft, a novel told through emails/Twitter updates/Facebook updates/text messages. I thought Save as Draft was utterly absorbing and although a love triangle isn’t the most original of plots, the email aspect and the fact Izabell (worst. spelling. ever. of. the. name. isabel/isobel/isabelle/isobell) isn’t annoying over her love triangle (you know, the whole “I want X/no I want Y/no X is for me” etc which Izabell does not do!), makes it easy to get involved in.

Izabell is your typical twenty/thirty-something modern female: a wactress (waitress/actress) turned lawyer (who knew?) obsessed with technology. Email, texting, Tweeting, Facebooking. If it’s technological, Izabell does it. However, Izabell isn’t exactly the best when it comes to love, so when she ends up with two guys to choose from, she has no idea where to start. First, there’s BFF Peter, and then there’s Marty, a guy Izabell meets on eHarmony and who she clicks with instantly. We follow her emails during the course of a couple of years as she struggles with her job and as she tries to decide who indeed is the man for her, if indeed either Peter or Marty are…

Save As Draft is a novel I managed to finish in a matter of hours, and I felt Lee’s emails were personal enough – from Izabell, from Peter, from Marty – that we quite easily get to know their characters and their personalities, despite no real narrative to the novel. I can’t say I was particularly enamoured with either guy – Peter was a bit of a workaholic, Marty a bit, er, weird, and I never really knew exactly where Izabell would go with either of them. The ending came as somewhat of a surprise, as well actually. It kind of made me sad the ending was so ambiguous, but apparently Lee is working on a sequel, so I will hold my words about the ambiguous ending.

The only downside of the novel, for me, is that it’s based heavily on Lee’s own life. There’s a PDF on Lee’s website about how the novel came around and as such, Save as Draft is basically (seemingly) Lee’s story with different names. It rather makes a mockery of the whole “All events are fictional” and although I know that writers say “Write what you know” but I’d rather not have known just how true-to-life Save As Draft is because a) it seems lazy to just write about your own life and b) fiction should be fiction, always. Nevertheless (because it’s probably just me who’s not a fan of writers writing their auto-biography masquerading as a fiction novel), I still enjoyed the book. It was a quick and easy read and, despite the stupid spelling of Izabell’s name, I liked Izabell. She was sweet, somewhat naive, and seemed as if she’d be a person you’d like, if she was real (and she could be real, as I’ve said above). I look forward to the sequel to Save As Draft, and I do wonder when we’ll see it because I’ll be buying it, for sure.