Annabelle and Lee. Danielle Allen. 2020. 240 pages. [Source: Kindle Unlimited.]
Annabelle and Lee is a love story that spans more than two decades — romantic, right? Annabelle Winston and Bradley Thompson met as tweens in the small Rhode Island town of Heathrow Beach. They spent three months of every year falling in love with each other, making plans for a future, and growing up. It was a fairy tale until Lee didn’t show up one summer — no call, no email, no AOL instant message. In turn, Belle grew up; she built an impressive career for herself, got married, and carved a life for herself, trying to forget about the heartbreak Lee’s desertion caused.
Annabelle and Lee starts with the story of how the two grew into love, and catches up with them when Belle returns to Heathrow Beach to pick up something from the family home and hopefully make peace with her heartbreak. While the book is primarily focused on placing Belle and Lee back in each others’ orbit, it also has a secondary plot involving a mysterious set of letters from the past, a dead woman in the present, and the realization that family secrets — infidelity, threats of violence, children — are part of their little cove’s story.
Overall, I was impressed at how Allen teased a contemporary romance out of a poem from the mid-19th century. The main characters’ names are obviously a play on the title, but their love story departs significantly from Poe’s. While Poe’s features heartache through death, Belle and Lee’s heartache is of their own creation. Nonetheless, the love is the same as the poem – stronger than those around them, perhaps misunderstood because of their ages. And don’t forget the kingdom by the sea.
Although the mystery was a lesser part of the story than I anticipated, I did find myself keenly reading for clues. I had all kinds of assumptions about who wrote the letters and what happened to them, as well as about the dead woman’s connections. For her part, I thought the author left breadcrumbs throughout the book to hint at the truth, but some felt like red herrings. So while the subplot didn’t get more shine, I enjoyed it nonetheless.
My only real critique of Annabelle and Lee is of the denouement. The way questions related to the dead woman’s identity and the old letters from their youth were resolved felt rushed. It was difficult to suspend my disbelief that everything would be explained so neatly and so relatively quickly. I don’t think it was a bad resolution, by any means, but it deserved so much more detail, dialog, and time than was given.
This is one of my first reads by this author, and I already know she has other books that reimagine Poe’s poems. I enjoyed this one, so I’ll definitely be checking out others to see how she brings her stories to light through the lens of someone else’s work from so long ago. Annabelle and Lee is definitely a book I’d recommend. It has enough tension around the main characters to keep you interested and the subplot was enough to hook me on its own merit.
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