The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman, by Louise Plummer, OR Alternate Universe Me

This book was published in 1995. I was somewhat relieved to discover that, because it means that Louise Plummer is not somewhere out there reading my mind. After all, in 1995 I didn't know a thing about linguistics, I didn't yet have my strange fascination with the Twin Cities in MN, I had seen skating occasionally on TV but hadn't been introduced to ice dance at all, and I didn't have any opinions on the process of writing or the distinction between fiction and autobiography or the conventions of certain literary genres.

Kate Bjorkman is a linguistics nerd living in Minnesota when she has a wonderfully romantic Christmas. She decides to turn her story of that Christmas into a romance novel, with help from The Romance Writer's Phrase Book, which can turn an everyday action into someone "flounder[ing] in an agonizing maelstrom" (8). As she writes her romance novel (which makes up the bulk of the novel we read), she stops every few chapters to note revisions she may or may not want to take, and she often has to decide whether or not what really happened has a place in a romance novel. Her family wants her to change the way she presents them, and her best friend thinks that since it's a romance novel, not an autobiography, Kate should have no qualms about changing things around to make her best friend a more important character. And since this is, after all, a romance novel, we get to follow her reintroduction to Richard, a boy who grew up with her, and all the romance that follows.

I picked this book up because there was a girl in figure skates on the front cover. You may think that I'm exaggerating, but I cannot put down a book that looks as though it may have something to do with figure skating. Sometimes this means I end up reading some really awful books with just one mention of skating. In this case, however, the characters went skating twice, and the second time they made reference to both killian and waltz positions, so it was totally worth it.

To add to the skating situations, there were lots of linguistics tidbits throughout. In the sixth line we already hear about a name ending in "an unvoiced velar plosive" (1). I always was taught that they were called stops, not plosives, but I can handle that. Kate also likes to identify people's hometowns by their accent and get into debates about the Whorfian hypothesis. I enjoyed this immensely.

AND, as if the figure skating and the linguistics weren't enough, we get lots of explorations of literary theory. Kate opens every chapter with an explanation of what this chapter should be doing in order to conform with the genre of literary theories, and by page 28 she's discussing feminist literary criticism. The distinctions between fiction and autobiography topped everything off, and I was a very happy English major while reading this book.

I wonder if Louise Plummer could both see into the future and read minds...that might explain the confluence of everything I love into one book.