Alphabet Weekends by Elizabeth Noble

Isn’t Love Lovely?  

Alphabet Weekends by Elizabeth Noble is about love, actually the many stages of love.  It’s about the love of a couple married forty years facing health issues. It’s about the exhausting love of a newborn baby in the family. It’s about another couple in the throes of unlovely complications.  And finally, there’s the pursuit of love. The main storyline revolves around Tom and Natalie.  They have known each other since they were kids. Tom has always liked Natalie but she considers him more like a brother than boyfriend material.  After Simon, her self-absorbed boyfriend of six years, dumps Natalie, the thirty-five-year-old is suddenly loveless.  That’s when Tom steps in to see if he can change all that.  He proposes a game of sorts where they would spend twenty-six weekends going through an alphabet of activities designed to see if they could find happiness together.  She’s skeptical; he’s enthusiastic. We start with “A is for Abseiling,” which translated from British to American, means rappelling.  Not all of the letters are thrill-seekers. Some are quite ordinary like “E is for Equine Eating” and “D is for Do It Yourself.”  Frankly, he had me at “I is for IKEA,” but there are even better ones. I was familiar with “V is for ….” Well, you’ll have to read it.  But trust me, it was a good choice! “P” was even more exciting. 

I liked the writing, too. And as you’d expect in proper English there were rhetorical questions scattered throughout, weren’t there? I liked all those unfamiliar British words and expressions which made me smile.  Phrases like “you nutter”; “he fancied her rotten”; and “he’s knackered” were amusing.  So was a scene at IKEA. “In the Bathrooms, a couple were arguing about towel colours. Apparently he was a stupid colour-blind git while his wife, allegedly ‘wouldn’t know good taste if it smacked [her] in the arse’."

Elizabeth Noble, Alphabet Weekends (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 171.

Gotta love it.

Happy Reading,

Annette