Britin Frazey

The third and final installment in Cara Bastone’s Love Lines series is an adorable story about two people who are sitting and chatting on a bus commute. Gwen and Sam are both late to boarding, so they end up in the back row– right by the bathroom. On their way from Boston to New York City, the two of them bond over the shared experience, which is at times terrible but usually flirty and fun.

The stakes of this story are rather high for our female protagonist, who is a world-travelling writer and photographer. She has a popular blog where she interviews people about their “adornments” such as tattoos and jewelry. I have to respect Gwen for picking a theme and sticking to it– but please don’t ever expect such practicality from yours truly.

Another four-star listen for me; I had a great time getting to know this dynamic duo, the pragmatic Gwen and the ray of sunshine Sam.

Cara Bastone excels at crafting complex characters that are enjoyable to listen to, with some realistic flaws, yet always in a somewhat idealized and upbeat manner. This is to say that while her writing is fun to engage with, it lacks a bit of the grit that I look for in my five-star reads– which is totally okay, because I love a good comfort listen.

Honestly, the title shares my main complaint with this story: it shouldn’t have been the final installment in this series. I’m all for interconnected romances, like how the first two followed Vera and her brother Eliot as they each fell in love with new partners. Going into this one, I had no idea how it would connect back to the Hoffman siblings, and honestly it kind of feels like the author didn’t, either.

It takes a while, but eventually Sam mentions his friend Paloma, whose name I recognized as a peripheral character in Vera’s story, Call Me Maybe. My biggest complaint with this is that Sam could have been friends with any girl in NYC, and the only reason it’s Paloma is so he can be retroactively connected to the Hoffman romance duology. If it had been Paloma’s story, or if I actually remembered Sam’s name being mentioned in the first book, I might have had different feelings. But as it stood, Sam just brought up Paloma and Vera every once in a while as if to remind listeners why they started listening to this book– which annoyed me because they never even made an appearance.

The style of this one was also quite different from the other two, which each had only two narrators, while Seatmate featured a full cast of voice actors.

That all being said, don’t come away from this review wondering whether I liked Sam, because he was such a fun character to me. I liked the way that he seemed perfect at first, and the way that it was revealed that he has his own flaws, too. Having an overbearing mother who’s always trying to set him up on dates, Sam takes the bus from NYC to Boston and back every month. The twist comes when we get to witness a phone call with him and his mother, where she tells him that she actually finds him to be an overbearing son. Up until that point, I honestly thought that Sam was a manic pixie dream boy with no flaws, but this caused me to reframe things and made a lot of sense.

While I enjoyed Sam from the start, Gwen was my favorite up until that little reveal came to reframe Sam’s perfection in my head. Perfection bores me, but Gwen was never painted as such in my eyes. I already described her as pragmatic, but she’s also got a lot of self-doubt that is hinted at enough within the narrative for listeners to relate to her. When she gets the potentially career-making interview with her celebrity idol at the end of the story, she is finally confronted with the fact that she wants to be done travelling, at least for the majority of her year.

I found Gwen’s struggle with her family, and feeling so different from them, to be really interesting, and the reveal that she is biologically her parents’ niece and had been taken in when her mother passed away. In adulthood, Gwen seems to cling to the idea that she needs to travel like her mother did to hold onto her– which is an interesting internal conflict, to me.

This book is a perfect example of how, on special occasions, you can just meet a person and instantly connect. While Sam and Gwen’s connection develops over the five-hour run of the audiobook, throughout a spilled tuna-salad sandwich and a long car ride after their bus breaks down.

Sam and Gwen face a flea market, a box full of kittens dumped on a highway, and a work rival racing to the same interview that Gwen is. Determined to get her there, Sam calls in favors from decades ago and negotiates a black and white kitten with a tow truck driver so he can make things work. The stakes are relatively low for him, but that’s the kind of guy that Sam is, especially once he decides to cancel his date (courtesy of his mother) due to his feelings for Gwen.

For Gwen, all she needed was a kitten with a pink nose and a boy with a streak of blue hair to realize the types of changes that she wanted to make to her life, and accept that she can be herself while also being more stationary.

Sam’s blue hair is a whole thing, done as a distraction for his mother’s recent breakup, which Gwen feels partly responsible for, having introduced his mom’s ex to her cousin, only for them to marry two months later. Having raised Sam, his mother is a very understanding person, and knows that it was not Gwen’s fault, or even her cousin’s, and it is not an issue. They confess their feelings only after Gwen’s interview, which was cathartic and sweet.

Overall, it was an adorable story about two people hitting it off on a bus and having a wacky adventure for the rest of the day, slowly falling for one another. At the end, we get an epilogue where the happy couple– now together a year– are on vacation with Sam’s mom, whale watching. Gwen’s blog has shifted to focus on NYC citizens, and also shares the adventures she gets up to with her boyfriend and his mom, who had never left the United States until they met her.

While I think that this novel would have been better set up for success as a standalone, rather than the out-of-left-field trilogy conclusion that it was, it was still an adorable and worthwhile story that I enjoyed quite a lot.