Grab the Lapels

Canadian Boyfriend by Jenny Holiday

I joined an in-person book club that plays book bingo. One of the squares is “rom-com” — not my normal reading. However, I recalled how much I liked that Jenny Holiday added serious elements to her novel Paradise Cove (it had child death and vaccine hesitancy) to give readers something to chew on before the characters fall in love. Holiday’s newest novel is Canadian Boyfriend.

I know that book covers have trends, but I really hate this newest one where everyone looks like a cutesy cartoon. Well, it’s better than when they use real models and everyone looks like they have 27 abs packed in above their leather pants. Anyhoo.

The premise for the novel is interesting. When she was sixteen, Aurora worked in the mall as a barista. One day, a handsome guy comes in and orders a sugary beverage. Somehow, he reveals that he’s a hockey player visiting the U.S. from Canada, and if I remember correctly, she’s puzzled by why a high-performance athlete would order dessert in a cup. It turns out the drink is for his teammate. The hockey player is Mike Martin. This brief encounter is probably all of ten minutes.

However, Aurora was working toward becoming a professional ballerina, so she spent much of her high school years missing all the big events — prom, clubs, even classes — going to tournaments. Because she was different, and because she was such a high-performance athlete herself, her classmates thought she was uppity. And she was, a bit. But also very lonely. To get out of social events where she would feel isolated, Aurora pretended Mike Martin was her long-distance Canadian boyfriend. Hence, the title. She wrote him letters and kept them in a binder, like a diary.

Cut ahead fourteen years and Aurora is a “failed” ballerina working at a dance studio made for kids who are never going to become professional dancers. The main rule is to have fun! She has insurance through her work at Starbucks, and she’s struggling financially because her boyfriend dumped her and she let him bail on his half of their rent. One of the regular dance students is returning after a year off because the 11-year-old girl’s mom, who always brought her to dance class, was killed in a car accident. Now, the tween’s dad is bringing her, and he is, you guessed it, Mike Martin, now a professional hockey player with the NHL. The chapters alternate from Aurora’s and Mike’s perspectives, which I enjoy. Oftentimes, we’re stuck in one person’s moony head while the other person just looks broody.

I really like that Holiday takes on the serious topics. Aurora hasn’t taught ballet in years because she “failed” to make it in New York City, dropping out of an elite dance school one year in, much to the disappointment of her mother. Currently, Aurora teaches only tap class and dutifully visits her mother, who decides what Aurora should eat and reminds her constantly what a financial drain Aurora was (ballet was not cheap). Can Aurora find her love for ballet again, can she stand up to her mother’s abuse, and will she tell Mike she pretended they were dating even though she didn’t know anything about him?

Meanwhile, Mike is trying to keep it together after his wife died by taking a season off from the NHL and learning how to be a parent. Holiday walks us through the hard part about death. Sometimes, it’s not grief but learning that we didn’t know everything about the person we loved, and now we can’t ask clarifying questions. At first, Mike is mad at his deceased wife but comes to learn how he contributed to the reasons he’s mad at her. Really, there is a feminist message behind Canadian Boyfriend about emotional labor, which is free yet unnoticed. Also, because Aurora’s mother is controlling, Holiday tackles issues of setting boundaries, eating disorders, and anxiety attacks. Because boundaries become so important to Aurora once she learns them, the novel was not predictable. I had a few guesses for how it would end, and I was not right.

My only negative is that too much was made of Aurora having written to a pretend boyfriend modeled after Mike. The early chapters have a few lines, something like, “I didn’t think the letters would be a problem, but boy, was I wrong…” that make you think the binder full of letters contain something heinous in them. Really, Mike doesn’t like being approached for his fame, so because Aurora knew he was a hockey player fourteen years ago but didn’t confess that until they were deep into a relationship, he feels she lied to him and knew he was famous. None of that makes sense to me. He wasn’t famous when she was sixteen, and everyone in the dance studio (dance moms, ew) knew he currently played for the NHL. I’m glad the idea of a pretend boyfriend was included because the letters beautifully show the depth of Aurora’s teenage loneliness, but they never should have been the reason accusing Aurora of lying. Fortunately, the “problem” of the letters only lasts a couple of pages.

Jenny Holiday is my favorite rom-com author, and I’ll definitely read more of her work, soon.

23 comments

  1. This sounds fun. I looked for this author in my local public library after you’d mentioned her in the comments to a recent post, but they have nothing by her. Maybe I can request this one.

    The “Canadian boyfriend or girlfriend” is an old joke, you know, for an imaginary love interest, usually, I think, to hide the fact that the person who claims this love interest is gay. There’s a song about it in the musical Avenue Q.

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    • Ha! I had never heard of the Canadian boy/girlfriend before, so that’s great that you told me. I was never good at fibbing, but I can see how I might have been more desperate to hide if I were Queer. I’m YouTubing the Canadian Boyfriend song right now.

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      • Hahahahha, I listened to it. Then I told my husband about it. He said that when he saw my book review title, he assumed it was a reference to Avenue Q. Surprisingly, there are no Queer jokes in Holiday’s book.

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        • Finally I got hold of a copy of this one. I really liked the parts where readers saw what Aurora’s mother said to her about food and witnessed Aurora being able to call her on it at last. The day when the mother said they’d had an “indulgent” lunch really hit home for me. I know it was my mother’s own struggles with her weight that made her say things like that. The mother is exaggerated– I think any woman would have made a side dish if a male had been invited to her holiday dinner– but the comment about what they were allowed to have for dinner that day after the “indulgent” lunch didn’t seem exaggerated at all. Luckily my mother didn’t try to say stuff like that by the time my daughter was born.

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          • I come from a long line of dieters, so passing down rules about food, how to walk, and what to wear is as normal as passing down culture. At this point, I wonder if dieting IS part of culture, not just “diet culture.” Anyway, my mom has come out of it, just in time for grand kids, so I feel some relief on that front. Her own mother swore she was a size 12 her whole life, even when she was very much not a 12. She continued to buy clothes in the same size, even though she could barely fit into them. My mom ended up passing down some nice dresses, etc. but cut the tags out so her mom couldn’t confirm or deny the size. That was all it took.

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  2. Heh, I like the tagline on the cover, “He’s not fake. He’s Canadian.” It covers the pretend boyfriend angle but also the alleged really niceness of Canadians to the point it might seem unreal. It’s a two-for! 🙂

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  3. Love this review, starting with your comment on the cover. I guess they are believed to appeal to the twenty and early thirty somethings? Maybe they do.
    I completely agree with your point about rom-coms, that you prefer they “give readers something to chew on”. I haven’t read many but that’s what I look for.
    Re the “lie”, I agree with you too from the way you describe it. I suppose rom-coms need something to stress the relationship, and this is the best the author could come up with. Clearly, from what you say, the letters play a good role in terms of conveying her teenage feelings, so then once introduced, they had to have some other way of being used?
    Anyhow, great post.

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    • Yes, this current style of cover irks me because it not only screams FOR WOMEN, but it minimizes the experiences of adult characters. These aren’t “finding myself” 20-somethings, even though the woman is in her 20s. It’s much more serious.

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  4. Your comment on the real romance novels where people have 27 abs made me laugh! I know exactly the type of book you mean and the cover of this one does give a somewhat different vibe.

    The forced misunderstanding is one of the things that often doesn’t work for me about this genre, and I think this sounds like a prime example of that. I think this is why romance only really works for me as an ingredient in other genres, not as the genre itself – where at least some of the obstacles can be external factors!

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      • Yeah, I’m just grateful the misunderstanding was all of three pages long and look forward to reading more from this author. In general, she handles everything nicely, though it IS still romance, so if that’s not your thing, and I know it’s not, this would likely be a pass from you. Then again, it does develop a relationship slowly and naturally, so maybe you WOULD like it.

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  5. “he’s not fake, he’s Canadian!” LOLOLOL

    I’ve never read Holiday but I enjoy a good rom com every once in a while, they warm the heart. I totally know what you’re talking about with the cover themes – I much prefer the cartoony look to the weird body shots of people’s abs, that was definitely a weird time.

    This sounds like it covers some serious topics again, which is nice. Also, I love when emotional labour is brought up! I can already see hints of it in your description, i.e. the kid’s dad needs to learn how to parent, even though he’s technically been a parent of years (but clearly not expected to parent!).

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    • After his wife died, he just didn’t realize how much his wife did. I think that would happen to pretty much every dad out there today, unless someone who visits my blog has a male spouse who remembers their kid’s favorite flavor of Fruit Rollup AND that you have to bring in a box of tissues on the first day of school to share with the class AND school spirit week definitely requires glitter.

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      • So true. My husband is getting so much better at doing his fair share, but ultimately these small details are things he doesn’t deem important, and yes they aren’t critical, but it’s so nice to do them anyway! That’s a big difference between men and women I think.

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        • I wonder if some husbands don’t fret the details in a good way, though. I don’t have kids, so take this with a grain of salt. Will the kid actually have a full-blown melt down if the crusts aren’t cut off the sandwich, or if he/she doesn’t wear their favorite t-shirt on Monday?

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  7. The “Canadian boyfriend/girlfriend” joke is so funny to me and I’m not even sure why. Obviously it’s not something anyone here would ever pretend! This does sound like a fun read and more thoughtful than I might have expected. Though I’m rolling my eyes a bit at the fact that he’s a hockey player. Many Canadians are not professional hockey players!

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    • The male character was in the U.S. for a hockey tournament and stopped by a mall coffee shop where the female character worked, so it was easy for her to see him and then construct a story around the skeleton of his personality. I find it funny that I always associate hockey with Detroit because I’m from Michigan and the Redwings have blown ALL THE TEAMS out of the water for many years. Well, I’m not sure how it is now, but yeah. Anyway, from what I’ve heard, hockey is one of those sports a lot of Canadians are raised on whether they do it professionally or not. Kind of like baseball and football in the U.S. or soccer in the U.K.

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