SYNOPSIS:
You never forget your first love. Isn’t that what they say? Verity Hill knows this truth intimately. She didn’t simply miss Wright “Monk” Bellamy when they parted ways in college. She’s haunted by his touch. Every kiss, any lover since-a shadow of what they had.
Time heals all wounds. Isn’t that what they say? Monk doesn’t believe that for a second. He wasn’t simply betrayed when he and Verity split. He was devastated, with parts of him left behind in the ruins of all that was destroyed.
More than a decade after their disastrous break up, Verity and Monk must work together on the set of an epic Harlem Renaissance biopic. With Monk, now a world-class musician creating the score, and Verity, an award-winning screenwriter penning the script, there’s Oscar buzz before shooting even begins. This once-in-a-lifetime project could catapult them both to new heights, but can they can put the past behind them for the sake of the film…for the sake of something more?
REVIEW:
A love story for the ages. And whilst I am loathe to use that well-worn term, it is apt here. This entire series will go down in history as one of the greatest series ever written. Of this, I am sure.
Have you ever loved someone so deeply that a decade apart could never make you forget the slightest thing about them; you still feel them by your side like it was yesterday, their love has sunk skin deep, your fingers remembers the sensation of their touch because the memories are embedded on them, their lips are forever imprinted on yours and for the rest of your life kissing someone else will always be wrong. Your memories are forever intertwined. It’s a love like no other, a love that happens once in a lifetime and so it must spin that block in the same iteration, with the same person, in a many next lifetimes otherwise it is not love but a tepid interpretation of what it was, because you know what it used to be; what it ought to be. A love like this will likely drive you to madness because there will never be one like it again.
This is the love story of Monk and Verity from its beautiful high, its gentle middle ground, to the incredibly deep low that breaks the heart so uniquely it can only be fixed by them for all their lifetimes. They orbit the earth jagged because the heart they walk around with, belongs to the other, forever. Monk and Verity are so yoked, theirs is a love that saw the highest of highs and crashed into the depths of hell where they were both doomed.
Fate sealed these two forever from the moment they laid eyes on each other, always and forever in an instant. This is the kind of love that pushes everything out of sight, not even to a fade, but makes everything completely non-existent except the two hearts that beat as one, in sync, before even a word was exchange.
When we meet Monk we see him through Verity’s eyes and so there is a vulnerability to him that he remains unaware of, one that leaves him exposed to us the reader and yet that reveal is so tender and so beautiful that when they get round to being in each other’s lives, we see the future they were promised but may never get to have. This is a love story that resonates on and off the page; because at some point in our lives we go through things that we need to be loved through especially when we are at our very worst selves. We need the person we have come to love to see through this worst to the best; good will simply not do.
Verity is unconventional to Monk’s very conventional upbringing, being a PK with a complicated childhood into a layered adulthood. She is out of his comfort zone, but without knowing it, or fully cognizant of it, he doesn’t care either way, he has signed up to whatever his life will be with her because there was never any doubt for him. His folks will simply have to fall in line because if they don’t, they would be the poorer for it.
Thematically, this story is superb because it explores the nuanced layers of religion in the context of sexuality and fidelity. Whilst Monk is a PK the home in which he grew up and hoped to emulate is destroyed by the person he never thought would cause such havoc and he watched as the community and parts of his family chose to carry on in the wreckage. He has to restructure his relationship to his faith; a constant struggle for him as it would be for anyone whose faith has been so tested and that test aided by those closest to home. It is always those closest to us that hurt us the deepest.
There is also the glaring and very present theme of mental health and how society, the medical profession and those in its annexes behave when it comes to the mental health of Black people; another very real world context because it does happen outside the pages of a book but what Kennedy Ryan has done here is give us a lens through which to dissect it for ourselves and maybe even give us the language to navigate it. Verity being bipolar is something she comes to later in life, not too late, but late enough to have it destroy the one thing she cherished the most above all else; love and it is a devastation from early on. What is so masterful here is how Kennedy takes us along, so even if we can see the signs, we also feel the heartbreak certain to come as Verity wrecks her way through from pin sharp clarity to absolute war and chaos of her own doing but not knowingly.
Language matters. When Canon has to navigate his words carefully when he says he is concerned, not worried, about Verity, the reader felt that because language often lends itself to misinterpretation and misunderstandings, it is the first frontier of prejudice and the most impactful one because it reverberates for decades. Therefore, it is important that he explicitly unclogs the layers of language in that scenario and that she knows the wellness of her mental health means more to him than getting the script right. It is more important she understand that too.
Community matters too. Those who rally round Verity, and by extension, Monk in their darkest of times are just as important to the story. They are the ones who hold them close even in the distance; even at times when it gets to be too much for them, we are able to see their struggle through the context of the persons they are protecting because for Mel, it gets to be a little too much and she gets to feel that and we feel it with her. They are also the ones who root for them every step of the way because their love comes with an understanding of the precariousness that will arise, but also a deeper level of that understanding of what happens when it does. To have a friend be so fully present through the struggle, regardless, is a true gift of friendship. And Kennedy Ryan writes a sonnet to a friendship, good!
The character work is some of the finest from a writer I have ever had the privilege of reading because these characters are so fully fleshed out, Monk and his vulnerability have our hearts. There is something so uniquely edifying when a man is vulnerable without guile, without shame, in the fullness of himself he is willing to remove parts of himself to take on another because that is how deeply he feels, how deeply he loves and wants to be loved. He never fully gets over what happened to his family; he struggles constantly when it comes to his relationship to God, but he is also very aware of the gift he has from God to be musically gifted, a talent that runs through a broken family, that harkens back to happier times. It is a layered conversation in his mind that we the reader are invited to explore, maybe not to even understand, but to see it fully as we often times have the same struggle.
Verity is one of the richest and most complex characters Kennedy has ever written; wherein in REEL, Neevah deals with an autoimmune disease that can manifest physically, in SCORE, Verity’s is one that cannot be seen as such, it affects her mind and makes her so vulnerable. Constantly having to stay vigilant, constantly navigating the landmines around her, constantly interrogating simple sentences, is a yes simply a yes, or is it the onset of an episode, weary her existence at every turn, analysing her future self, weighing her hopes and dreams in such a way where it shifts and changes her audacity to dream. But all through this battle is Monk; a constant, whether or not she wants him to be. She has to interrogate that as well; what this will do to him, to them, how this would affect his own desires even when he says he is all in.
Trust, so quickly given, too easily lost and destroyed is often hard to regain, hard earned, and harder still to keep once recovered. These two must navigate what it means to trust after such devastation, after such heartbreak, the wreckage of the aftermath to their hearts and their relationship. It is a constant in their situationship twelve years later, but even when one protects themselves or think they have, the heart, as I always say, wants what it wants and damn the consequences to hell.
Now let’s talk about the mastery it takes to bring this story to life. What Kennedy Ryan set out to do here is not only ambitious but pure genius. She is first and foremost a researching writer and it shines through in her work.
She sets about bringing history to the fore for the reader.
She sets about enlightening us because society has failed us when it comes to the roots of our stories.
She sets about altering the course of history by centring themes that are oft pushed to the margins.
She sets about giving such a duty of care to the reader because we mean so much to her. You never leave a Kennedy Ryan book feeling okay; you leave a Kennedy Ryan book feeling protected. The trust you place in her hands as a writer is well worth it. You leave knowing you have been well cared for and tended to, but also with a deep desire to know more about our stories and histories. A deep desire to seek out the stories of the ones who “deserved a shout” from mountains tops, who deserved to be celebrated, whom life and prejudice robbed of genius and care, who were often relegated to the sidelines of history barely worthy of a footnote.
You leave a Kennedy Ryan story with deep curiosity. It is a fundamental skill of hers and what a treat it is that we live in an era where a writer of her calibre lives among us; for an age and then some this series, the Hollywood Renaissance, will be talked about and referenced as the blueprint. It is a story that will never leave you.
It will never leave me because long after, three re-reads of the paper back, four copies ordered, three relistening to of the audio and then chasing it with REEL doubling back to SCORE, and one immersive read of audio and print, I cannot stop thinking about Monk and Verity and all they are to each other. These words keep turning in my head when I think about their story;
I have been driven to the brink of madness,
I have soared high and been brought low,
I have sunk to the depths of hell and found new hells,
I have loved,
I have been loved,
I have been afraid to love,
I have loved even whilst being afraid of love.
I have surrendered myself to the chaos in my brain,
I have been broke,
I have been broken,
I have lost myself in the depths of despair,
I have lost everything.
I have flown as high as love would allow me,
And like Icarus, winged too close to the sun,
Unlike the mere mortal, I flew right through the sun,
I have revelled in the after burn,
I have been a god.
I have defied the odds for love,
I have driven love away,
I have still been loved.
I have sought the darkest side of darkness and painted it darker,
I have stolen kisses from strangers in even darker corners,
I have buried love in the darkest of places.
I have been held hostage by her love,
We are at the mercy of her mind for our love.
In the depths of madness, love sought me out and pulled me into the light,
And still I sought the darkness for fear of what the light will reveal.
I struck a match and set aflame fires so wild,
It reduced our love to nothingness,
And yet I have grasped for love among the ashes,
The caustic air fills my lungs with the embers of our love.
I have been a child as an adult,
I have been an adult before I was a child,
I lost my childhood to that wildfire,
And I have let the fire that rages from my past consume my present.
Love and sorrow have known me since before I was born,
Lighting my path and snatching me into darkness,
Still, I fought for a love that reduced my world to rubble,
I fought even harder.
I have been buried in love,
I have been made desolate by her love,
Yet, I have stood defiant for our love.
Because in the field of battle,
As the loudness of war rages on,
In the cacophony of the chaos,
Beneath the carcasses of our many love stories and lifetimes
Is our moment of wonder,
A spark so bright it guides me to the light,
To you.
And here I am, at peace,
Cocooned in the chambers of your heart,
Where your better angels quieten the roars of my demons,
With the whispers of your love.
Our love.