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The Deal: The Romance Novel That Was Smarter Than I Expected · The Book Brief Project

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  Speaker 1: A girl at a college party keeps one hand flat
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  Speaker 1: over the top of her cup. She does it without
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  Speaker 1: thinking about it. She has done it at every party
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  Speaker 1: for five years and she will do it again next weekend.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: And if you ask her why she will hand you
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  Speaker 1: something short and funny and move the conversation somewhere else.
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  Speaker 1: I noticed the gesture early and filed it under characterization.
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  Speaker 1: Small touch, nice detail.
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  Speaker 2: Moving on.
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  Speaker 1: It was not a small touch. That hand is the
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  Speaker 1: engine of the whole book, and I was a couple
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  Speaker 1: hundred pages in before I let myself see it. I
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  Speaker 1: came to this one in a mood I am not
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  Speaker 1: proud of. There is a hockey player on the cover.
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  Speaker 1: There is a fake relationship on the back. There are
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  Speaker 1: a million ratings, a streaming adaptation, an algorithm purring somewhere
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  Speaker 1: behind all of it. I expected to spend an afternoon
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  Speaker 1: being politely condescending to a piece of merchandise that and
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  Speaker 1: to walk away with a tidy little argument about how
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  Speaker 1: the machine flatters the people who buy it.
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  Speaker 2: The afternoon did not go that way.
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  Speaker 1: I walked away with a harder problem, and the harder
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  Speaker 1: problem is the reason we are here. The book is
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  Speaker 1: The Deal by Elle Kennedy, published in 2015 on her
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  Speaker 1: own into a market that had just worked out it
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  Speaker 1: could sell college romance by the pallet. It outsold most
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  Speaker 1: of what the traditional houses were putting beside it. It
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  Speaker 1: turned into five books, then a second series orbiting the first.
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  Speaker 1: It was a Popular Choice Award nominee the year it
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  Speaker 1: came out, and in May of 2026, 11 years later,
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  Speaker 1: it arrived on Prime Video as an eight-episode series that
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  Speaker 1: was renewed for a second season three months before the
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  Speaker 1: first episode aired. Two different generations of platform have now
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  Speaker 1: consumed this book, and almost nothing anyone says about it
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  Speaker 1: in public, then or now, describes what is actually inside it.
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  Speaker 1: The setup is as transactional as the title. Hannah Wells
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  Speaker 1: is a junior at Briar University, a music student who
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  Speaker 1: waits tables and keeps her head down. Garrett Graham captains
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  Speaker 1: the hockey team, plans to go professional, and has just
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  Speaker 1: failed a philosophy midterm along with 70% of his class.
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  Speaker 1: He needs a C-plus average to stay on the ice.
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  Speaker 1: Hannah is the one student who aced the exam. He
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  Speaker 1: asks her to tutor him.
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  Speaker 2: She refuses.
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  Speaker 1: Repeatedly, and with visible enjoyment, and he keeps coming back
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  Speaker 1: until he finds the lever. She has spent an entire
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  Speaker 1: semester looking at a football transfer named Justin Cole and
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  Speaker 1: has never once spoken to him. So Garrett proposes a trade.
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  Speaker 1: She teaches him ethics. He walks her into a party
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  Speaker 1: on his arm and lets the whole campus watch, and
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  Speaker 1: Justin notices what everybody else notices. A novel that opens
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  Speaker 1: with a contract about who is allowed to want whom,
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  Speaker 1: Keep that in your pocket for a minute. Then comes
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  Speaker 1: the part no cover copy has ever mentioned. Hannah does
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  Speaker 1: not drink at parties because she was drugged at a
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  Speaker 1: party when she was 15 and raped by a classmate.
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  Speaker 2: The case went nowhere.
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  Speaker 1: His friends testified that she had been willing, the charges evaporated,
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  Speaker 1: and the town picked a side that was not hers.
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  Speaker 1: Her father hit one of the boys who lied and
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  Speaker 1: was arrested for it. Her family spent money they did
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  Speaker 1: not have on a proceeding that ended in nothing, and
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  Speaker 1: she carried that arithmetic to college with her. The damage
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  Speaker 1: she brings into the story is specific, and Kennedy is
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  Speaker 1: unusually exact about it. Hannah can reach orgasm alone. She
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  Speaker 1: cannot with another person in the room. A relationship of
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  Speaker 1: eight months died on that fact, and she let it.
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  Speaker 1: She has decided that something in her wiring was cut
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  Speaker 1: and will not reconnect.
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  Speaker 2: And she has arranged an.
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  Speaker 1: Entire life to route around the question. So the romance
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  Speaker 1: is doing work that is not romantic. Every beat a
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  Speaker 1: book like this would normally spend on escalation. This one
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  Speaker 1: spends on negotiation. She tells Garrett, she does not drink
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  Speaker 1: in public. He does not tease her out of it.
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  Speaker 1: He offers to be her driver and her bartender for
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  Speaker 1: one night.
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  Speaker 2: Nobody else near her glass.
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  Speaker 1: And the night that follows is the first time in
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  Speaker 1: five years she is loud in a room full of strangers.
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  Speaker 1: About halfway through, you can watch Kennedy make the choice
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  Speaker 1: that decides the book. Hannah, sober and mortified by her
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  Speaker 1: own nerve, asks Garrett to sleep with her as an experiment.
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  Speaker 2: She has reasoned it through. He is casual. He is safe.
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  Speaker 1: He will not stay long enough for the failure to
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  Speaker 1: cost her anything.
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  Speaker 2: The genre has one.
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  Speaker 1: Obvious move available at that exact moment, and everyone listening
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  Speaker 1: already knows what it is. The man's expertise repairs the woman.
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  Speaker 1: All that accumulated skill gets deployed on a problem and
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  Speaker 1: the problem yields because he is that good. Kennedy will
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  Speaker 1: not take the move. What Garrett proposes instead is symmetry.
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  Speaker 1: Neither of them touches the other. They undress on opposite
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  Speaker 1: sides of a room, and watch, each doing for themselves
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  Speaker 1: what the other has not yet earned the right to
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  Speaker 1: do for them. The design is equal exposure. It works
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  Speaker 1: because the risk in the room is evenly distributed for
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  Speaker 1: the first time in her adult life. Afterward, he tells
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  Speaker 1: her she was never broken, and she is close to
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  Speaker 1: believing him. I want to be careful about how much
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  Speaker 1: credit that deserves, because it is easy to overpraise a
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  Speaker 1: popular book for clearing a low bar. So let me
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  Speaker 1: put the claim plainly. In 2015, two years before this
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  Speaker 1: vocabulary went mainstream at full volume, a self-published campus romance
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  Speaker 1: handed several hundred thousand young readers a working model of
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  Speaker 1: what repair actually looks like. Slow, incremental, mutual, and steered
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  Speaker 1: from start to finish by the person who was hurt.
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  Speaker 1: No essay was reaching those readers. No curriculum was reaching them.
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  Speaker 2: This did. Janice Radway published a.
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  Speaker 1: Study in 1984 called Reading the Romance. She spent months
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  Speaker 1: with a group of women in a Midwestern town who
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  Speaker 1: read romance novels by the armful, and the Academy at
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  Speaker 1: the time had a settled and unflattering opinion about those women.
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  Speaker 1: Radway came back with something else. Her readers knew exactly
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  Speaker 1: what the form was, used it on purpose, and extracted
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  Speaker 1: from it a kind of instruction and compensation that nothing
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  Speaker 1: else in their lives was supplying. The formula was the
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  Speaker 1: delivery system, and the delivery system was the whole point.
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  Speaker 1: Forty years on that argument still holds, and it is
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  Speaker 1: the only frame in which this book can be read fairly.
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  Speaker 2: You do not get to.
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  Speaker 1: Dismiss the packaging and keep the cargo.
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  Speaker 2: There is a.
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  Speaker 1: Second thread running alongside all of this, in the music department.
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  Speaker 2: And it rhymes.
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  Speaker 1: Hannah has spent the semester surrendering creative control to a
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  Speaker 1: duet partner, who keeps rearranging her song into his song,
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  Speaker 1: adding voices, moving the key, charming the composer onto his side.
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  Speaker 1: When he finally maneuvers her out of the partnership altogether,
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  Speaker 1: she performs alone, one cellist beside her, a piece she
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  Speaker 1: wrote herself, and she wins the scholarship. Same shape as
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  Speaker 1: everything else in the book, she is strongest at the
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  Speaker 1: moment she stops accommodating somebody else's version of what she
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  Speaker 1: is for. Hold on to that idea, because the book
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  Speaker 1: is about to turn it on its own hero, and
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  Speaker 1: that is the moment it stops being a book I.
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  Speaker 2: Was merely impressed by.
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  Speaker 1: Kennedy gives Garrett a wound of his own, and I
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  Speaker 1: want to push on that. His father is Phil Graham,
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  Speaker 1: a retired league legend with two championships and a charity page,
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  Speaker 1: who started hitting his son the year his wife died
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  Speaker 1: of cancer.
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  Speaker 2: Garrett was 12.
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  Speaker 1: It happened on Halloween, which is why he does not
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  Speaker 1: celebrate it. The beating stopped when he got large enough
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  Speaker 1: to make them expensive. At a Thanksgiving dinner late in
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  Speaker 1: the book, he watches his father's girlfriend flinch away from
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  Speaker 1: a hand on her shoulder, clocks the long sleeve she
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  Speaker 1: is wearing in a warm house, and understands every bit
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  Speaker 1: of it, because he spent his childhood reading the same
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  Speaker 1: signals in his mother. The parody is elegant and a
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  Speaker 1: little too convenient. Both of them arrive damaged, which means
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  Speaker 1: neither has to be the patient and neither has to
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  Speaker 1: be the therapist, which is precisely the arrangement the book
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  Speaker 1: requires if its central scenes are going to happen between equals.
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  Speaker 1: Real asymmetry would have been harder to write and more truthful.
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  Speaker 1: I notice the convenience. I also notice what the convenience buys,
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  Speaker 1: and I'm not certain I would trade it away. Then
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  Speaker 1: the book turns on its own thesis, which I did
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  Speaker 1: not expect. At a home game, Hannah goes rigid in
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  Speaker 1: the stands. One of the boys who lied for her
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  Speaker 1: rapist is standing a few rows down at her school
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  Speaker 1: inside her life. Garrett reads her face, gets the name
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  Speaker 1: out of her, crosses the arena, and opens the guy's face.
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  Speaker 1: He takes a one-game suspension, and then he is afraid
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  Speaker 1: of himself for a hundred pages because the thing he
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  Speaker 1: has spent his entire life out running is his own
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  Speaker 1: capacity to damage people who cannot stop him. Hannah is
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  Speaker 1: the one who draws the line. and the line she
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  Speaker 1: draws is the cleanest thought in the novel. His father
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  Speaker 1: hurts people he claims to love. That is the difference,
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  Speaker 1: and it is the only one that matters. So the
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  Speaker 1: book examines its protective hero and finds him unstable, which
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  Speaker 1: makes what happens next stranger than anyone seems willing to say.
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  Speaker 1: When Hannah later ends the relationship and refuses to explain why,
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  Speaker 1: Garrett's answer is to inform the men of Briar that
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  Speaker 1: she is off-limits and the campus obeys. The novel plays
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  Speaker 1: this as a grand romantic gambit.
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  Speaker 2: Readers have loved it for 11 years.
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  Speaker 1: And nobody appears to notice that it is the same
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  Speaker 1: instinct that crossed the arena, dressed better.
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  Speaker 2: Nobody touches her cup.
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  Speaker 1: Now, nobody touches her at all, and she was consulted
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  Speaker 1: about neither. The reason she ended it is that Phil
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  Speaker 1: Graham walked into the diner where she works and told
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  Speaker 1: her to disappear or he cuts off the tuition, the rent,
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  Speaker 1: the car, the whole apparatus.
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  Speaker 2: She checks every exit.
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  Speaker 1: Finds them all closed, and lies to Garrett instead. He
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  Speaker 1: does not buy the lie. He extracts the truth out
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  Speaker 1: of her, and then he laughs. Because his grandparents left
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  Speaker 1: him money his father never knew existed, coming to him
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  Speaker 1: on a birthday a few weeks away, a check goes
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  Speaker 1: out repaying every cent his father ever spent. The team
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  Speaker 1: takes the national title. Phil stands alone by the bus
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  Speaker 1: while a locker room of young men decline to look
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  Speaker 1: at him. Every one of those resolutions is earned by
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  Speaker 1: the rules of the genre.
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  Speaker 2: Not one of them is earned by the book.
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  Speaker 1: That month of grief cost nothing in the end, because
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  Speaker 1: the instrument that dissolved it had been sitting in a
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  Speaker 1: drawer the entire time. The father's power evaporates on contact
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  Speaker 1: with a legal document. The season closes with a trophy.
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  Speaker 1: A story that spent 200 pages insisting that damage has
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  Speaker 1: a duration, that it does not clear because you decided
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  Speaker 1: it should, then settles every remaining account in about a week.
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  Speaker 1: Hannah's injury is the only thing in the whole book
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  Speaker 1: with a real price attached.
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  Speaker 2: Everybody else gets amnesty.
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  Speaker 1: Some of that is simply 2015 showing its face.
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  Speaker 2: Read now.
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  Speaker 1: Parts of this are ahead of their moment, and parts
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: are well behind it. The negotiation at the center would
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  Speaker 1: survive any workshop today. The early stretch, where Garrett wears
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  Speaker 1: Hannah down by turning up at her job and texting
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  Speaker 1: her until she answers, is served as charm, and the
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  Speaker 1: same audience that adores the rest of the book would
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  Speaker 1: read those scenes very differently if they were written this year.
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  Speaker 1: Kennedy was working a decade before a streaming service turned
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  Speaker 1: her campus into a ranking and a renewal announcement. Which
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  Speaker 1: leaves me with a thing I cannot close. Something in
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  Speaker 1: this book did genuine work for a lot of young
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  Speaker 1: readers who were never going to meet it anywhere else.
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  Speaker 1: And the packaging that carried it to them also taught
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  Speaker 1: them the terms. Repair shows up in the form of
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  Speaker 1: an exceptional boyfriend. Safety is something a large person provides
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  Speaker 1: rather than something a life gets arranged to contain. The
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  Speaker 1: lesson and the fantasy are stitched into the same object
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  Speaker 1: and they cannot be pulled apart. Because the fantasy is
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  Speaker 1: what got the lesson through the door. Democratic or domesticating.
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  Speaker 1: I have been moving between those two words for a
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  Speaker 1: week and I have not landed. If this is the
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  Speaker 1: kind of thinking you have any use for, the kind
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: that slows down instead of speeding up, follow the podcast.
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  Speaker 1: No quick summaries. Books taken seriously. I came to this
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  Speaker 1: book expecting to be smarter than it was. I left
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  Speaker 1: thinking about a girl with her hand flat over the
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  Speaker 1: top of her cup, and about how many readers recognized
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  Speaker 1: that gesture immediately. In a novel, they had been sold
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: as an afternoon of nothing in particular. They did not
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: meet that hand in a syllabus. They met it in
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  Speaker 1: a paperback with a hockey player on the cover, between
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  Speaker 1: a fake relationship and a championship game. A new set
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  Speaker 1: of readers is arriving at it right now through a
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  Speaker 1: streaming series, and most of them will describe it to
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  Speaker 1: their friends as the hockey one, the fun one, the
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  Speaker 1: one they finished in two days. Some of them will
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: be lying and will not know it yet. Formula, all
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  Speaker 1: the way down, and still the first place anybody told
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  Speaker 1: them the truth.