Reviewed by Chris
TITLE: Perfect Day
AUTHOR: Sally Malcolm
PUBLISHER: Carina Press
LENGTH: 274 pages
RELEASE DATE: August 13, 2018
BLURB:
First love conquers all in Perfect Day, a captivating contemporary male/male retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
Love doesn’t burn out just because the timing’s wrong. It grows. It never leaves.
When Joshua Newton, prodigal son of one of New Milton’s elite, fell in love with ambitious young actor Finn Callaghan, his world finally made sense. With every stolen moment, soft touch and breathless kiss, they fell deeper in love.
Finn was his future…until he wasn’t.
Love stays. Even when you don’t want it to, even when you try to deny it, it stays.
Eight years later, Finn has returned to the seaside town where it all began. He’s on the brink of stardom, a far cry from the poor mechanic who spent one gorgeous summer falling in love on the beach.
The last thing he wants is a second chance with the man who broke his heart. Finn has spent a long time forgetting Joshua Newton—he certainly doesn’t plan to forgive him.
Love grows. It never leaves.
REVIEW:
This year might have had a lot of ups and downs, but so far it has also given me two queered Jane Austen retellings that have hit it out the park.
This one, a reimaging of Austen’s Persuasion, was thoroughly enjoyable, emotionally enthralling, and damn entertaining. I’ve always loved this particular book of Austen’s. It has an emotional gut-punch that is only really rivaled by Sense and Sensibility, for me, and I was freaking over the moon when I realized that Sally Malcolm was going to queer it the fuck up. This is the first book I’ve read of Malcolm’s, so I had no clue what I getting when I asked to review this book, but if this is a reliable measure of her writing, I’m going to have to check out her backcatalog.
Perfect Day doesn’t follow the Persuasion plot beat for beat, but like all good retellings, it takes what it needs from the book it is based and focuses on getting the feelings and intent correct, instead of transposing every page of the original. It is, in my opinion, the best way to do these kind of stories. This story doesn’t try to cram in characters or scenes that were not needed for the plot, but instead builds a world around Finn and Joshua that makes sense for the contemporary time in which they both live.
While I’m not going to give a full synopsis, I think there have been enough changes made to warrant at least a quick roundup of what is going on. Joshua is the son of a wealthy family who in his youth fell in love with Finn, an aspiring actor. They spent one summer together, fell madly in love, and planned to run off to Hollywood together when the summer came to a close. Joshua, on the advise of his aunt, though, changes his mind. Heartbroken, Finn goes to Hollywood, intent on making it big and forgetting the man who hurt him…while Joshua finds himself just as heartbroken, but with his life going nowhere and forced to regret and remember the one man who might have been his one and only love. This story picks up just as Joshua’s family is being forced to sell their home to pay for his father’s debts and Joshua comes to find out the Finn’s brother is to be the new owner.
While mainly focusing on Joshua, Perfect Day, unlike Austen’s novel, gives us a look at the story from Finn’s perspective as well. Originally I was a bit thrown by this when it happened the first time, but as the story went on, I was glad to have this alternate perspective. It gives the story a bit more depth, being able to see things as Finn sees them, to get a better understanding of why he is a bit of an ass at times. He was genuinely hurt by Joshua in the past, and having to come back and not only face the memories of that summer, but the boy-turned-man who inflicted those wounds, has a real impact on his character and his actions. He becomes more sympathetic, even if some of his decisions are a bit douchey.
And Joshua embodies a lot of the hurt and regret that I was expecting (and craving) when I picked this book, but he also has a bit more sense of self than his counterpart in Persuasion. Probably due the gender and time changes, there wasn’t as strong of a sense of having missed the boat for Joshua. Unlike in the the 1800’s, not being married by 20, let alone the fact that as a man things would have been wildly different anyways, isn’t some kind of societal death sentence. Here there isn’t the sense that Finn coming back is Joshua’s last hope. Certainly there is a feeling that Finn really is The One, and losing him a second time would be fucking tragic…but there are other things out in the world for Joshua if this one thing doesn’t work out. It made Joshua feel a bit less hopeless than the heroine of Austen’s story. Both work well for their own setting, but I am glad that Malcolm realized that not everything could work the same in both books.
Perfect Day turned out to be just about everything I was looking for, to be honest. It was a great retelling of a story I have long loved, but it was also just a very well crafted, told, and realized romance on its own. Joshua and Finn are not great together because they are crafted from the same cloth of characters who have existed for several centuries, but because they are characters wholly crafted to fit in this story. And it is told in a way that reflects the changes in circumstances in both the characters and the setting, but which also brings with it the heart of regret, loss, rekindling, and second chance romance that made Persuasion such a good story to begin with. Be you a lover of Austen’s tales to begin with, or if you are just on the look out for a good contemporary story of love and forgiveness, this is an excellent addition to your tbr pile.
RATING: 
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