THE SCENIC ROUTE by Devan Sipher-a review
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ABOUT THE BOOK: Release Date June 3, 2014
Austin Gittleman is running late, and not just for the seaside wedding he’s attending. Austin’s an eye doctor, who doesn’t see what’s in front of him, until he crashes into Naomi Bloom, a pastry chef with a taste for adventure. Naomi believes a straight line isn’t always the shortest distance between places — or people.
Do any two people look at love the same way? Austin and Naomi offer conflicting narrative accounts as they circle each other through a series of miscommunications and missed connections. In The Scenic Route, life is what happens on the way to where you’re going. It’s unpredictable and sometimes fleeting, but it can be pretty wonderful when you bring the right person along for the ride.
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REVIEW: THE SCENIC ROUTE is a fictional storyline about love, loss, mistakes and making amends. It is not necessarily a romantic storyline because our leading couple has a habit of destructive behavior that finds them in one relationship failure after another. But don’t despair, they will get their happily ever after, only it takes a few years, a few failures and a few regrets.
Told from two distinct third person POV, the focus of the storyline is Dr. Austin Gittleman (an ophthalmologist) and pastry chef Naomi Bloom-one time childhood schoolmates who were re-introduced in Florida at a mutual friend’s wedding. After a hot night of passion and sex, Austin and Naomi each went their separate ways hoping the other would stop and ask for something more. As the years pass, Naomi and Austin would run into one another from time to time, and each of their hearts would break a little more. Naomi and Austin are in love with one another but are too afraid to express their true feelings.
The reader is pulled into a frustrating but interesting story about two people whose lives have been turned upside down by the choices they have made. Not that their lives were abnormal, because in fact, their lives are quite similar to many thirty something singles looking for that special person in love and life. Naomi and Austin continue to ride the relationship roller coaster while the reader holds on for something more permanent.
Devan Sipher writes a story that will resonate with many people whose lives are too busy, too focused or too involved to settle down with that special someone. The storyline covers several years; several failures; the death of two marriages; and the death of someone close. It is a story about love- a love shared by two people-one who wants to take the ‘scenic route’ through life while the other finds the path (or route) of least resistance more to his style.
The secondary characters are colorful and drive a major portion of the storyline. We are introduced to family, friends, lovers and the professionals our couple meet along the way. It will take several failed relationships for Naomi and Austin to understand that who they have always wanted was only a phone call or text away. This is a story about two stubborn people who were afraid to take a step in a different direction knowing that what awaited could have been their happily ever after.
Copy supplied by the publisher.
Reviewed by Sandy
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Born in LA.
I always thought that would make a good title for my memoir. Not that I have any intention of ever writing a memoir.
I grew up mostly in Southfield, Michigan, which sounds misleadingly bucolic for a suburb of Detroit with more than 27 million square feet of office space.
I graduated from the University of Michigan. (Go Blue!) After brief stints in medical school and rabbinical school, I ended up getting a master of fine arts degree at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
For the past seven years I’ve been a writer of the Vows column at The New York Times. Rumor has it that in the movie 27 Dresses, the actor James Marsden portrayed me — but with better hair.
