Attachments, Rainbow Rowell

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, 323 pages

After reading Rowell’s popular Young Adult stories Eleanor & Park and Fangirl, I was eager to read more from her so I checked out her first novel – Attachments. Attachments is an adult fiction novel revolving around a computer security technician, Lincoln, and two newspaper employees, Jennifer and Beth. 

Basically, Lincoln’s job is to monitor the emails of the Courier Newspaper staff, which involves him reading any email messages that are flagged as suspicious in content. Jennifer and Beth are best friends and are constantly communicating with one another through their work email. They discuss their relationship issues, family problems, and basically everything unrelated to work. Thus, their emails are constantly flagged for Lincoln to review.  After reading their emails practically every day, he ends up truly caring for both women and falling in love with Beth, even though he has never met either Jennifer or Beth in real life. He doesn’t report their emails to his manager because of his feelings for the women, and because he enjoys reading about their lives and wants to know more.

Throughout the story, Lincoln struggles with the nature of his job and becomes increasingly uncomfortable essentially spying on the employees. He is in his late twenties, still living at home with his mother (who treats him like a child) and is really unsure of who he is and where he should be at in this point of his life. The emails between Jennifer and Beth show a similar uncertainty with the path their own lives are taking as Jennifer is not eager to start a family, despite her husband who desperately wants a child. Beth is stuck in a relationship with a man who seems to care deeply for her, but she is confused whether or not he is actually the one she is meant to be with.

For me, Attachments was not as much as a page turner as the other two Rowell novels that I absolutely loved, but it was still a touching and relatable story nonetheless.