The recap
It is 1999, the internet still feels like a novelty, and the staff of a Nebraska newspaper barely remember that someone might be reading their email. That someone is Lincoln O'Neill, an overeducated, underemployed night-shift worker whose title, internet security officer, sounded far more thrilling than the job. Mostly he flags off-color jokes. Then he starts reading the messages that Beth and Jennifer, two colleagues and best friends, trade all day about boyfriends, marriages, families and movies. He knows he ought to send them a warning. Instead he keeps reading, and somewhere among their running jokes he falls for Beth, a woman he has never met and cannot think how to approach without confessing everything. Rowell alternates the friends' sparkling exchanges with Lincoln's quiet, lonely evenings, building a romance from a premise that is equal parts sweet and awkward. Set against Y2K jitters in a newsroom on the cusp of change, it is a gentle comedy about loneliness, nerve and fresh starts.
Why read it
For readers who like their romance gentle, funny and a little nostalgic, and for anyone who has ever fallen for someone through their words before seeing their face.
Fun facts
- 01
Rowell spent about a decade as a metro columnist at the Omaha World-Herald and began writing Attachments near the end of her time there, as a creative outlet rather than a career plan.
- 02
She assumed that finishing the manuscript was the achievement in itself; it was her husband who insisted she do something with it.
- 03
Kirkus Reviews named it one of the outstanding debuts of 2011.
- 04
Attachments was Rowell's first novel; her young adult novel Eleanor & Park, published in 2013, became her breakout hit.
