59 pages • 1 hour read
Lucy ScoreThings We Never Got Over
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Subverting Contemporary Romance Tropes
Things We Never Got Over is a romance, a popular fiction genre that has long dominated the publishing field along with murder mysteries and political thrillers. Score, since her debut in 2015, has published more than 30 best-selling titles, all romances. Score is unapologetically committed to the genre and writes in the book’s Author’s Note that she enjoys crafting stories about “heartbreaker heroes and kick-ass heroines.” While Score embraces a genre that is sometimes dismissed as unserious, her novels both use and subvert classic romance tropes, offering a fresh perspective in a genre often focused on lighthearted entertainment.
Score’s signature novels investigate the emotional lives of hypersensitive characters, both male and female, whose hearts have been shattered and who nevertheless yearn for intimacy. Score interrogates classic genre tropes and archetypes, rather than merely repeating them. For example, Naomi’s classic runaway bride isn’t just someone who nearly married the wrong person, but someone who seeks to find herself after experiencing emotional and physical abuse. Likewise, Knox’s fear of commitment isn’t just toxic, masculine bravado, but the result of trauma from watching his family fall apart after his mother’s death. The characters don’t just find a salve or easy happiness in their lovers; they must undergo personal growth and emotional catharsis to become better partners and allow themselves to love.
Another typical trope that Score subverts is the damsel in distress/knight in shining armor dynamic. Not only is Naomi no damsel, but the book eschews a solution that focuses just on the protagonistic couple. Rather, Things We Never Got Over, like many of Score’s romances, focuses on the power of community and the necessity of family and friends for love to succeed. This is underscored by each character’s arc in the novel, but especially by the climax in which Naomi and Waylay are kidnapped. Knox springs into action, be he is not the stereotypical solo action hero; rather, he works together with the Knockemout community to overwhelm Hugo’s gang, and Naomi and Waylay demonstrate their own ingenuity and bravery as well.
Score’s success is often attributed to both her adherence to tried-and-true romance archetypes—including her prolific output—and her emotionally complex characters and plots. Just as Knox and Naomi’s physical intimacy is their avenue toward deeper emotional connection, Score’s readers can enjoy classic will they/won’t they plots, exciting (and explicit) sex scenes, and satisfying happy endings alongside thoughtful character studies and explorations of themes like trauma, self-discovery, and community.
Authorial Context: Lucy Score as Public Figure
Born at the fin de millennium, Score represents a new and assertive generation of writers who grew up using the Internet and social media. With this, having a savvy sense of the market and maintaining an accessible and down-to-earth profile is necessary for many contemporary authors. Score, for her part, maintains a website where she reaches out to readers with intimate charm. The website features photos of the author as well as intimate, diary-esque entries that share moments of her day. She writes a newsletter to fans who sign up through her website. These emails, two or three a week, offer inspirational bon mots as well as up-to-date factoids about works in progress. In addition, Score embarks on cross-country book signing tours when she releases new titles, meeting with readers who identify themselves not so much as readers but as fans. Score’s target audience is Gen Z. This testifies to Score’s novels as a welcome respite, a place apart from the tumult of never-ending wars, racism, environmental catastrophe, political dissent, economic downturns, pandemics, and geopolitical tensions.
This public negotiation suggests that novelists like Score are willing to embrace celebrity status rather than disdain it like many 20th-century literary giants. For Score, readers offer her a network through which she can promote her faith in the integrity of love and the viability of hope, themes she promotes on her website, in social media posts, and in impromptu talks at book clubs, libraries, and bookstores. Authors as brands, novels as in-demand commodities, and characters and themes as cultural and personal messages define Score’s authorial context.
Literary Context: Alternating Narrators
Any decision about how to tell a story impacts how the story is understood, and such formal strategies contribute to the thematic understanding of the story. The romance between Naomi and Knox is related in chapters that alternate between the two as first-person narrators, centering their relationship itself rather than either narrator’s experience of it specifically.
First-person narration creates intimacy between the character and the reader and lends immediacy to the events. By filtering the events through a single character, the narration also reveals how that character perceives those events. Readers trust a first-person narrator unless accumulating evidence suggests the narrator is unreliable. Then that unreliability inspires investigation into the motives for the deception. In short, the first-person narration becomes an essential element in determining a book’s thematic focus.
Two characters sharing the narration allows the reader to see two different perspectives and also complicates the authority of either narrator. Placing trust in characters is always tricky, but determining where to put trust when two narrators have an initially contentious relationship creates narrative tension. This device of dueling narrators helps define the novel’s themes. The reader gets two versions of the events that bring Naomi and Knox together and comprise their emotional journeys with each other. Neither version of events counters the other; rather, chapter by chapter, the novel moves forward through the collaboration of Naomi and Knox. Read either of the narrators’ sections alone and the story is incomplete. The book’s structure mirrors its emotional arc: two individuals whose unique experiences and perspectives combine into a cohesive whole as a romantic relationship.
Because these narrative strands never overlap, the novel refuses to skew the telling in favor of one character or the other. Naomi and Knox maintain the integrity of their perceptions, but neither narrative’s authority is sufficient unto itself. Combined, the reader is given access to the internal thoughts, backstories, and motivations of each character, and knows more than either of the two characters do independently. Alternating narrators then create two complex characters rather than a single narrating voice. That reflects the novel’s larger theme that love works only when two strong, independent people find their way to each other. Together, Naomi and Knox are prepared to do what the novel’s structure foreshadows they will do: come together in a joint, lifelong narrative.
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