October 26, 2022
Playing by Heart:
A Novel
Mary Flinn
Fiction Worx (2022)
Print ISBN: 978-0-9907197-9-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9977696-0-9
New Novel Counterpoises Stories of Romance and Survival in 1920s and 2020s
Mary Flinn’s new novel Playing by Heart is a standalone work that is also a sequel to her previous novel LUMINA. It juxtaposes modern-day characters living through the pandemic in Wilmington, North Carolina, with a story set in the late 1920s.
In modern-day Wilmington, Anne Borden (AB) Montgomery, a just-turned eighty independent woman, decides to search her attic for more of her mother Sylvie Meeks’ diaries as reading material to entertain her and her friends in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. AB has been looking after her longtime friend, Bernie May, also eighty, who has been dealing with a personal illness. Their neighbors, Elle and Nate, are a young couple in their thirties planning to get married until the pandemic disrupts their lives. The four of them come together on AB’s porch, properly social distanced, or via Zoom, to read Sylvie’s diaries and continue the story of her romance and life in Wilmington and now at Oberlin College in Ohio that they had previously begun reading.
Flinn does a superb job of keeping the suspense going by switching back and forth between the two time periods and showing how the modern characters react to Sylvie and her friends’ predicaments. While Elle, Nate, Bernie, and AB cope with wearing masks and disinfecting groceries, Sylvie lives in the aftermath of the 1926 flu epidemic that led to the early deaths of her mother and two younger siblings. When Elle and Nate’s neighbor Patsy contracts the coronavirus, they take in her mixed race, teenage grandson, Aubrey, and they all watch with outrage as they see George Floyd die on TV due to police brutality. Meanwhile, Sylvie arrives at Oberlin College where she befriends black and Jewish students and finds that her Southern accent makes her an outsider. The issues Sylvie faces are as relevant today as they were then, as the modern characters realize.
At the center of each story is also romance. Sylvie meets a young man at Oberlin whom she soon becomes interested in, but she isn’t sure to what degree he returns her feelings. He seems to flirt with her, then pull away. Her roommate, Dot, has the same issues with her young man. Finally, secrets are revealed that put things in perspective for Sylvie. Meanwhile, a young man back home is also interested in her. As if figuring out her own love story were not enough, Sylvie is also caught up in trying to understand her brother’s romance with her friend Catherine. LUMINA had largely been about Catherine’s own tragic story, and now in Playing by Heart, she’s trying to put her life back together. Her story will inform some of Sylvie’s personal decisions.
Meanwhile, Elle and Nate debate how they will pull off their wedding or if they can even have one due to the pandemic restrictions. Elle owns a bakery and is dismayed as one bride after another cancels her wedding and consequently her cake order. Even if her own wedding were held, would anyone be able to attend?
The reader is in for a real time-travel adventure in these pages as they experience the discrimination of the 1920s, the music of the Jazz age, train rides, and speakeasies, all while recalling the discomfort of lockdowns from the pandemic we’ve all lived through. Flinn does a beautiful job of tying together the two stories and bringing both to a satisfying conclusion that will leave the reader wanting more. Fortunately, Flinn has a hard time letting go of her characters, so Sylvie, Elle, AB, and all the others may yet appear in another novel.
For more information about Mary Flinn and Playing by Heart, visit www.TheOneNovel.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of When Teddy Came to Town