Review on Love Comes Calling by Siri Mitchell

  Love Comes Calling, Siri Mitchell’s latest offering takes a unique turn in that her main character Ellis Eton is not the stereotypical heroine- she does not have it all together…at all.  As we meet Ellis at the beginning of the story, she is a  failing co-ed who is poised to pursue her dream of acting and basically bolt from her education at Radcliffe to escape to Hollywood to be a movie star.  The problem is, even though she comes from a wealthy family, that plan would never fly with her family or her pretty wonderful long time friend who wants to be something more -Griffin Phillips.  With Ellis constantly failing to meet her family’s expectations, she  alway’s hear’s the phrase “Oh, Ellis” and is pretty pressed down by the feeling of constantly disappointing those around her- professors, family, etc. Our heroine is comical in all the scrapes she finds herself in, but she yearns to be able to do something that she feels good at.

Ellis tries to help out her friend Janie by filling in for her as a switchboard operator, as she was not permitted leave by her job to attend her mother’s funeral, and take her away for a two week period. Ellis and Janie share an uncanny resemblance and since Ellis is an aspiring actress and needs the money to help her make her trek to Hollywood, she decides to go to work in Janie’s stead, posing as Janie. As she is trying to learn the ropes of being a switchboard operator, she accidentally forgets to flip a switch and in turn hears a conversation that she shouldn’t be listening to, one where her very own Griffin is at the center of things and sadly it all sounds very   dangerous. Thus begins a journey for Ellis that starts to quickly spiral out of control, meeting shady characters, seeing the insides of a Speakeasy and seeing first hand the many issues surrounding  Prohibition.  

I have to say that the author’s research and after notes in the back of the book are most impressive. It was a fascinating concept to me to take a modern day issue - the heroine having ADHD- and placing her in a historical setting (the 20’s) and see what that might look like. Exploring the idea of that ADHD translating into always feeling like a disappointment to her parents, worked well I believe. This is tough for me because I really wanted to like this book and for me, with no pun intended , it was just hard for me to connect to it. Trust me, I love a bumbling, scatter-brained heroine, (I feel that is me most of the time ), but I didn’t feel like the relationship with Ellis and Griffin developed in a way that made me cheer for them at the end.  I just needed a little bit more to their story. It also would have been nice to know how things worked out for poor Janie as well.  However, I believe that if you are a Siri Mitchell fan, then you will enjoy this book as her usual excellent attention to historical research is present and accounted for.  

3 stars

I was graciously given a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.  All opinions expressed are my own.