Before We Were Strangers

Carlino’s Before We Were Strangers is a work of contemporary romantic fiction. It also falls under the new adult fiction classification. True to the tradition of the romance genre, Before We Were Strangers employs tropes to inspire its primary plot line. Readers of romantic fiction rely on such tropes for a sense of literary consistency and comfort. The familiar patterns, plot models, and character conflicts that pervade contemporary romance novels offer readers orderly narrative worlds with resolvable scenarios. No matter the variety of tropes that romance novels might use throughout the plot, one trope that is consistent to all romance titles is the guaranteed happy ending. 

In Before We Were Strangers, Carlino primarily embraces the first love, lost love, and second chance romance tropes. The novel also lightly incorporates the friends-to-lovers and forced proximity tropes. Grace Starr and Matt Shore initially meet and get to know each other because they live in side-by-side dorm rooms in NYU’s Senior House. They start spending all of their time together as their living circumstances compel them into constant contact with each other. Their relationship begins as a friendship, and they spend many months refusing to label their dynamic or act on their sexual attraction to each other. Eventually, they start sleeping together, and their friendship evolves into romance—they become one another’s first loves. These tropes compel the characters to get to know one another gradually.

Grace and Matt lose touch with each other after college and their story thus becomes the story of lost love. When they’re apart, they feel lost, alone, and confused. They know they should let the other one go, but they often live in the past and compare their new partners to each other. Their longing also makes room for their second chance at love. In the second-chance romance scenario, two ex-lovers have the chance to rekindle their romance after they “cross paths,” eventually falling back in love. In Grace and Matt’s story, they get their second chance when they run into each other on the subway platform 15 years after losing touch. In the narrative present, they start spending time with each other again, rekindle their romance, and ultimately find happiness as a married couple.

Carlino’s use of these romance tropes offers Grace and Matt’s otherwise meandering journey toward a happily-ever-after ending a nostalgic, reassuring mood. Grace and Matt have their differences and encounter conflicts throughout their relationship, but Carlino’s tropes always remind the reader that Grace and Matt will end up together regardless of their challenges.

Carlino’s novel contributes to a growing literary trend. The romance genre has particularly taken off via social media, which has in turn inspired romance-themed bookstores around the globe. Before We Were Strangers is in conversation with other works of contemporary romantic fiction, including Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2016 novel One True Loves, Annabel Monaghan’s 2023 novel Same Time Next Summer, and Mercedes Ron’s 2017 novel My Fault.