Ivan Scott’s Debut Novel
Sarah Farnsworth, a British surgeon who works in the US, is a Tottenham fan and has a ‘funny’ accent (for American standards), enters the operating theatre to perform a surgery that, on paper, is straightforward and low-risk. But, despite her good-luck ritual and her skills, the surgery doesn’t go as planned, and Sarah is shuttered.
While her mother passed away, her ghost is still very much present in Sarah’s life, and the loss of a patient only heightens that negative voice she constantly hears in her head. When this and the fact that Sarah developed a proper phobia of entering the operating theatre become too much to handle, she is forced to take a break. A friend of hers offers a temporary way out: there is this old guy, named William ‘Billy’ Caldwell, who needs someone to drive him around Atlanta for a few days. He needs to run some errands, but being of a certain age, he doesn’t trust himself behind the wheel. Would Sarah be at all interested in taking up on this offer? After all, she has nothing to lose, or do, so she accepts.
This physical journey across the city turns into a journey down memory lane: Billy is not just simply an old man with business to attend to, and all the anecdotes he tells of what he lived and went through over the years, help Sarah to put her own life in order too. It’s a refreshing and illuminating experience for Sarah, who will eventually overcome her fear of operating theatres and go back to work. But at what price?
Because, contrary to your usual romance story, there is no happy ending for this one.
While this is Ivan Scott’s first novel, written around four years ago, it will never cease to amaze me how his work is marketed as ‘romance’ when it is so much more and have nothing to do with the traditional trope ‘boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl’ (or any other gender combination).
This is a great story, that dwells heavily into reality. Many people on this planet go through experiences that make them change their mind or their life-path, that make them open their eyes and go in a different direction, but not necessarily there is a romantic experience involved, nor it has to end with ‘boy gets girl’.
And that’s the beauty of Ivan Scott’s books: they transcend the pure romance experience, leaving behind all the outdated and, honestly, annoying cliche so well loved by a certain part of the reading population. It’s fiction with a hint of romance, and accomplishes what fiction should do: digesting reality by breaking it into simple chunks, to help ‘ordinary’ people understand it and maybe even get a hint on how to solve problems they have in their own lives.
The hope is that in the future his books will get the credit they deserve, because his stories are brilliant, the prose is always clean and clear-cut, never boring nor absurd. Perhaps dialogues can sound unrealistic at times, especially when trying to portray the way British characters speak, but this is honestly the only fault I could find, and I had to look very hard.
All books by Ivan Scott are available for purchase on Amazon.
