47 pages • 1-hour read
It's a Love Story
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Background
Authorial Context: Annabel Monaghan
Annabel Monaghan is an American author. She attended Duke University, where she received a BA in English, and then received an MBA in Finance from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She has since published four full-length novels, two young adult novels, and two works of nonfiction, all of which have been New York Times bestsellers. She is also a Library Reads Hall of Fame author. All of her adult fiction titles have been published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Monaghan’s novels include Nora Goes Off Script (2022), Same Time Next Summer (2023), Summer Romance (2024), and most recently, It’s a Love Story (2025). Her young adult novels include A Girl Named Digit (2012) and its companion title Double Digit (2014). In 2007, Monaghan began her authorial career in the nonfiction realm with the publication of her title Click!: The Girl’s Guide to Knowing What You Want and Making It Happen. She later published Does This Volvo Make My Butt Look Big? (2017), a collection of essays based on her humor column, first published in The Rye Record, and she also writes for Huffington Post and The Week.
All of Monaghan’s works of fiction feature romantic stories that explore themes of family, friendship, self-exploration, and female empowerment, and her nonfiction titles echo these themes. Monaghan’s titles are in conversation with other works of contemporary romantic fiction, including Carley Fortune’s This Summer Will Be Different, Elsie Silver’s Wild Eyes, and Morgan Matson’s Second Chance Summer.
Genre Context: Contemporary Romantic Fiction
It’s a Love Story is a work of contemporary romantic fiction. Novels that fall under this genre classification feature a primary love story, typically between a heterosexual couple. Another feature of the romance genre is its reliance on tropes that allow the author to craft a narrative world that’s familiar, comforting, and escapist for her reader.
The tropes that Monaghan uses in It’s a Love Story include the enemies-to-lovers, opposites attract, forced proximity, fake dating, professional romance, and happily-ever-after tropes. Jane Jackson and Dan Finnegan appear to be opposites at the novel’s start—whereas Dan is confident and easy-going, Jane tends to be uptight, anxious, and controlling. However, when they’re compelled to travel to Long Island to work on the same script, they’re forced to get to know each other. The more time they spend in each other’s company, the more they start pretending as if they’re dating, constantly inventing make-believe dates for themselves. Ultimately, they open up to each other, fall in love, produce their movie, and live happily ever after. Monaghan uses these tropes to satisfy her readers’ expectations, and they also lend Jane’s otherwise complex self-discovery journey a neat narrative scaffolding.
However, Monaghan defies romance genre expectations by allowing the title to focus solely on Jane’s personal growth. The entire novel is written from Jane’s first-person point of view, while most contemporary romance titles alternate between the romantic leads’ perspectives. Monaghan subverts this tradition to grant Jane autonomy over her professional, personal, and romantic story, allowing the novel to function as a feminist text. Jane does discover love, but she doesn’t change simply because of Dan; rather, she claims her voice and vision and reconciles with her past, healing and growth that allow her to establish a sustainable romantic relationship and complete the romantic arc of the novel.
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