It wouldn’t be summer in the book world without a rom-com beach read. A novel that typically explores love, loss, and new love. “Rom-com” stands for romantic comedy and usually follows privileged or wannabe privileged single young women on the make-for high-end dates or mates. The vibe is upscale, the setting a well-known tourist area. And, there’s always a solidly grounded heroine who is not that into parties, pricey clothes, and pop watering holes, and who will prevail. Rom-coms feature scenic landscapes, simple characterizations, and rather obvious narrative arcs.
Enter Kristan Higgins with her new novel Look on the Bright Side – with its soap opera title and cover photo of a young woman with a bike and dog walking along an empty shore. And what’s more rom-com than the subtitle – “Second chances come once in a lifetime.” But wait! Look on the Bright Side, a binge-worthy rom-com, surprises, with its grounding in the medical world, particularly ALL -acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
To facilitate her research, the author became a hospice volunteer and shadowed doctors in cancer wards and ERs. Moreover, she knows, as well, about art galleries, the domain of the heroine’s mother, Ellie, a successful but aging-out painter on Cape Cod.
As for our heroine: Dr. Lark Smith, a twin, from a close, loving family, she’s an oncology resident at Hyannis Hospital. Smart, reliable, well informed about her discipline, she nonetheless becomes emotionally overwrought in the cancer ward. The death seven years ago, of the love of her life, her soul mate, whom she met when she was five, haunts her still. He had ALL. They had become engaged, both sets of parents thrilled, but then the cancer which had struck years earlier and abated, suddenly returned. Lark was devastated. And in the Oncology unit, she can not hold it together. She’s finally transferred out.
The head surgeon of the hospital, an international star named Lorenzo Santini, whom everyone calls Dr. Satan, can’t stand her. Or anyone. A handsome, wealthy but bitingly arrogant sociopath, he yet may have a way out for Lark to get back to Oncology -- IF she helps him out with a difficult situation. Nothing personal but weird.
Lorenzo comes from a large family. His sister is getting married in a few weeks; he’s close, however, only to his grandmother who raised him. Before she dies, she wants to see him settle down. Thus, he needs a pretend girlfriend for his sister’s wedding and pre-wedding events. Lark will do. She’s pretty, intelligent, engaging. She refuses the money he offers but is persuaded by his promise to recommend her to the prestigious Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He soon discovers, however, that she can more than hold her own.
His family adores her but doesn’t know that she’s make-believe. The game works until at one event Lark meets Lorenzo’s erotically charged, funny, totally likable brother Dante, a fireman. Lark can’t explain it but he gives her the butterflies, weak knees, and a mysterious sense that she’s seen him before.
One of the pleasures of Look on the Bright Side including its sharp humor, is the author’s upending of expectations and her smooth integration into the plot of a major character, Joy, with ostensibly no connection to the others. Fat, ugly, lower class--- at least that’s what her physically and emotionally abusive parents called her – Joy ultimately connects with Lark and with Lark’s mother. And in suspenseful alternating chapters named for each of these major characters, Higgins explores deeper aspects of friendship and love. Rom-com sure but well done.
