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FICTION
Love Unleashed
Melanie Saward
Penguin, $34.99
Brynn Wallace has a New York City dream. The Bigambul woman from Goondiwindi has just graduated with a master’s of writing, editing and publishing, and now has her sights set on an editorial internship at The Paris Review. The coveted six-month program at the famous literary journal is offered twice a year and competition is stiff. But Brynn is determined and self-assured. After all, to work in publishing and produce works that reflect her lived experience has been a lifelong dream for a girl who’d been feeling out of place in books.
Melanie Saward delivers all you expect from a romcom.
But then she finds herself in New York on an 18-month working visa with no work. No friends. No connections. What to do?
Melanie Saward’s foray into romcom, Love Unleashed, is a charming and surprising take on one of the most popular genres of fiction. Brynn is an “urban Blakfulla” who harbours all the basic fantasies of the city: ice skating in Central Park, warm pretzels, the Rockefeller Centre Christmas tree, hot chocolate and cake at Serendipity 3. The plot meanders seamlessly, taking readers on an unexpected ride through the most iconic settings in the Big Apple.
But shortly after Brynn arrives in the big city, she quickly learns a universal truth: New York is great – for those who have money. She gets a job at a doggy daycare in Tribeca and finds herself under the thumb of a tyrannical boss.
There, she is assigned duty of care over a classroom of dogs, including Perdita, the TikTok famous Dalmatian who makes more money than the humans who are paid to walk it. Seeing New York through the eyes of a Bigambul mob, everything shifts. Bright lights can mask more than reveal.
A “romance-novel handsome” commissioning editor at The Paris Review enters the daycare, promising to introduce Brynn to New York literati. But men with chiselled jaws are always suspect, are they not? Soon, after a string of disappointments, Brynn discovers she might be chasing a dream that would not fulfil her as an Aboriginal woman. Could it be that all her impressions of New York have been engineered by culture, by capitalism, by consumerism?
Brynn’s observations of the city are crystallised by her interactions with her new flatmate, Corey, a Tkaronto native. “I’m trying to do this thing where I unapologetically use proper place names when I know them,” she tells Brynn. She’s from Toronto – “a Native girl who comes from a long line of various traumas and trauma-informed behaviours”. The pair form an immediate attachment. Their apartment is a “house that intergenerational trauma built”.