Snappy dialogue and unlucky-in-love protagonist? It must be chick lit

ROMCOM
Best, First and Last
Amy Matthews
Simon & Schuster, $32.99

Amy Matthew’s Best, First and Last has all the ingredients for a good chick lit: exotic location (Peru), a grieving granny who carries around (and chats to) her dead husband’s ashes, uses the words “sexting” and “catching feeling”, snappy dialogue that would put the Gilmore Girls to shame, and, of course, a smouldering stranger the heroine nicknames “Romeo”.

The heroine in question is Heather, a young woman whose grandmother, the urn-carrying Bonnie, announces she has bought tickets for them (plus Bonnie’s daughter, Sandy) to Peru to visit Machu Picchu for her 70th birthday. As Bonnie’s husband, Junior, had died two days before her party, which is subsequently turned into a wake, she guilt-trips her daughter and granddaughter into going on the trip.

Following the chick-lit prescription, Heather is unlucky in love and has an ex called Shawn hanging around who tells her it’s their “destiny” to be together, although all she sees are red flags. She takes off to Peru separately from Sandy and Bonnie and meets a “seriously gorgeous” tall, dark stranger on her first night, who plays into the comedy of errors later in the book.

The three women begin their trip with plenty of bickering and banter about their relationships. Sandy has just discovered that her ex, Heather’s father, is about to get remarried, throwing another emotional cat among the pigeons. The story then goes into flashback mode with Bonnie and Sandra’s memories of meeting the various men in their lives, mainly the cool, reckless kinds who wear aviator sunnies and tight jeans or sing in a band. There’s a lot of talk about magic and lightning strikes, as well as the old favourite “destiny”, and Heather tries to understand why she’s inherited relational dysfunction.

Because so much of the story hinges on what Heather learns through her mother and grandmother’s romantic relationships through flashbacks, the book struggles to maintain momentum in the present-day parts of the story. The conflict lies in Heather’s reckoning with her life, with the only other complication being a will-they-won’t-they element in her relationship with the tall, dark “Romeo”.

If you read this book wanting to experience a trek to Machu Picchu vicariously, you may be disappointed. The conversations dominate the scenes, and you get the sense that the story could have been set anywhere; Peru is simply a backdrop.

While the genre calls for deep and meaningful chats about life and love, there’s a missed opportunity in Best, First and Last to engage the reader with unexpected twists and turns in the present-day plot line in Peru, aside from a handful early on. Matthews states in her acknowledgments that her grandmother made the trip to Machu Picchu in her seventies. Bonnie is probably the strongest drawn and most interesting character in the book, who touches on deeper themes in what is revealed about one of her relationships.