Overall Grade: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
“I love you, Ryot. Thank you for loving me. For being patient with me. For making me feel like I matter. I’ve been made to feel like I add zero importance to this world, but you…you make me feel worthy of the air in my lungs.”
“Love is being ready to stand up for and protect the one who owns your heart.” I teach college writing, and one of the essay assignments for my class asks students to write about relationships. They must answer this question in an essay: which leads to more “meaningful, clearly-defined relationships”: the courting and dating practices of the past or the present? This question asks us to consider the traits of a “meaningful, clearly defined relationship.” Inevitably, as my students and I discuss those traits, the word “trust” is discussed. At 18 and 19, my students believe trust means that their significant other won’t cheat on them. I eventually interject and say, “trust means giving your heart and soul to someone and trusting that they accept it fully, allowing you to be your most vulnerable. It means that they will care for that vulnerability.” My students often get quiet when they realize that true trust means believing your significant other will see and accept you through anything.
This lesson is the crux of Meghan Quinn’s newest story, Untying the Knot. This story has the requisite charm of Quinn’s other romances with a heroine in Myla who keeps everyone in her life on their toes. She hides her vulnerability behind a facade of quirk, and the quirk endears her to Quinn’s readers and her hero, Ryot, a third baseman for the Bobbies, Quinn’s fictional baseball team found in earlier stories. As Ryot and Myla fall into attraction and eventually love throughout Quinn’s story, her readers encounter the realities of relationships: that they are hard. If we’re not careful, we can lose them when we stop focusing on our partners.
There is a depth to Untying the Knot found in shades in other Quinn stories, but this one hit me square in the heart. I found myself needing to take breaks after various chapters because Quinn crafts Myla in such a way that you can feel her pain, the abuse and the trauma rendered by her parents. In contrast, in the chapters focusing on Ryot and Myla falling in love, Ryot offers the salve for the wounds perpetrated on Myla. It’s easy to fall for him early on, as he falls first because Myla’s walls are high. However, Quinn characterizes the carelessness of relationships through Ryot’s journey. As he faces retirement and a future without baseball, Ryot makes choices for himself and Myla that effectually changes their relationship, making Myla feel unseen. Untying the Knot is an admonishment about the care needed in a relationship, a reminder that it takes care and intentionality to love another. When Ryot remembers his purpose as a husband, the beauty of this story is fully realized as Ryot strives to love Myla again, as she needs to be loved.
Meghan Quinn’s Untying the Knot is not an easy romance. Instead, it requires patience in its reading because it suggests that, once a person has been wounded, it takes care, consideration, and purpose to heal and find reconciliation. Thankfully, romances such as Quinn’s require happy endings. It’s this resolution that keeps her readers driving forward in her story. But don’t miss this one because we can all use a reminder to love first, not least.
In love and romance,
Professor A
Professor Romance 