Trailer Park Tuesday: The Remedy for Love by Bill Roorbach

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

On the Richter scale of my book love, the needle swings wildly, scribbling in wide arcs across the paper, when it comes to Bill Roorbach's new novel The Remedy for Love.  My feelings for this book run so deep and strong that they rumble bedrock, crack the earth, topple buildings.  If you think that's some unchecked Overpraise, then just wait until you read The Remedy for Love for yourself and see if you don't feel the same way.  Seven months ago, I was lucky and privileged to read an advance copy of the book and offered up a few words on its behalf to the publisher:

Take two strangers—Eric, a small-town lawyer, and Danielle, a former schoolteacher turned homeless squatter—put them in a cabin in the Maine woods, spice it up with a little romantic tension, stir in the wreckage of past love affairs, sprinkle liberally with sharp, funny dialogue, then add the Storm of the Century which buries the cabin in huge drifts of snow, and—voila!—you've got The Remedy for Love, one of the best novels of this or any year. I'm not a doctor, but I'll be prescribing Bill Roorbach's novel to readers sick of blase, cliched love stories that follow worn-out formulas. What we have here is a flat-out funny, sexy, and poignant romantic thriller.

I meant every word when I wrote the blurb half a year ago, and I'd say the same thing if you were to ask me today.

The book trailer--handmade by the author himself--gives you a good feel for what's inside the front cover: fast-falling snow, howling winds, and the rich warmth of Roorbach's prose as he narrates the opening paragraphs of Chapter 2 when Eric makes the fateful decision to give Danielle a lift home as the storm approaches.

I can count on one hand the number of books I've re-read in my life--Catch-22, the Bible, Dombey and Son, the works of Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver--and now I'll add The Remedy for Love to that list (twice in one year, no less!).  I think I'll wait until the snow starts to fall (which could be any day now here in Butte, Montana)--you know, just to lend a little verisimilitude to this love story between two blizzard-bound characters.  I can feel that happy rumble starting deep inside my chest already.