2 weeks ago
12
ROMCOM
The Last Resort
Amanda Hewitt
Echo, $34.99
Forty-two-year old Abbey is single and stuck swanning around in a Maldives resort. Is there anything worse? Picture the turquoise sea, swaying palm trees and obsequious staff, and here she is lying on a couple-sized bed all by her lonesome. She was supposed to be there with her long-term husband to reconnect their fraying ties, but six months ago, he left her for another woman. No wonder she thought “going on a holiday by yourself was a one-way trip to Loserville.”
Amanda Hewitt’s debut novel is mocktail-sweet and won’t look out of place bespeckled with sand on your beach towel or accidentally splashed with pool chlorine. It’s a romance with all the requisite tropes: two attractive protagonists prevented (at the start) from lying in each other’s arms forever more thanks to a series of misunderstandings and unresolved grief. That they end up together is a foregone conclusion, but the ride to get to the glittering end has enough bumps to sustain interest.
After finally taking advantage of her paradisial environs, Abbey goes on a drunken, topless dip in the sea, only to be “rescued” by a handsome English gent staying in the next room, who’d mistakenly believed she was drowning. As an initial meet-cute it’s pretty excruciating. But Nick is tall, dark and handsome (of course) with impeccable manners. For two weeks, a hot and sexy tryst is mutually enjoyed (with a cameo waterfall) while they are both in vacation mode.
But then, real life beckons. Abbey returns to Sydney to the home she shares with her teenage daughter Ella and sister Kate. But then, when she starts back at work as an executive assistant at a high-end hotel chain, she finds out that the company’s new owners are … Nick and his brother Oliver. How will Abbey navigate this fraught situation: her former fling who’s now her boss?
The points of view of both lovers are provided in alternate chapters, so the reader is privy to the thoughts of a perimenopausal woman fretting while considering a possible new romance, and a commitment-phobic man determined to keep his heart chained due to previous losses.
There’s nothing new in this narrative set-up, but Hewitt’s Abbey is genial and warm – in fact, her likeability is one of her faults. In being conflict-avoidant, she’s too much like water, her firebrand grandmother Iris points out, constantly compromising to fill whatever shape is required. The Last Resort explores Abbey’s struggle to adhere to Iris’ motto to “not be feeble”, to ask for what she wants in work and love.
Hewitt does ramp up the fantasy element of her book: Nick is not only a “certified hottie” but also super rich (among his many assets, he owns a penthouse overlooking Sydney Harbour and has a personal driver). Like Darcy’s fumbling overtures to Elizabeth, Nick’s wealth facilitates a number of grand gestures to Abbey in his awkward attempts to show his feelings.
But romantic complications aside, the novel carries the strength of female advice and solidarity. Abbey’s emotional support lies in the trifecta of her daughter, sister and grandmother.
They are the ones who should be credited with helping her rebuild and reinvent after divorce as much as the ministrations of a moneyed and buttoned-up Brit finally learning to loosen up.
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