49 pages • 1 hour read
Ashley PostonA Novel Love Story
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Eloraton, New York
Eloraton is not only the setting for the majority of A Novel Love Story but also symbolizes Elsy and Anders’s love of fiction and desire to escape from their lives in the real world. When Elsy stumbles upon Eloraton, she is lost and wants to escape from her life where she suffers heartbreak and loss. She describes arriving in Eloraton by saying, “I knew I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay in a world where the plots are predictable and the endings are happy. Somewhere just as frozen as I am” (230). Throughout the novel, Elsy describes escaping to Eloraton more metaphorically when she reads the Quixotic Falls novels over and over, thinking, “I just needed a story—or maybe a few hundred stories of happily ever after—to escape mine” (86). Yet, when she is physically in Eloraton, Elsy begins to learn even more about herself and what she needs to move forward with her life.
Eloraton also provides an escape for Anders. Though, in the novel, he has lost his ability to enjoy books, Anders is able to escape to the town and immerse himself in its story. He does so as a way to escape from his real life, where the tragedy of his fiancée’s death still haunts him. Wanting to become a part of the last thing Rachel left behind, Anders stayed in Eloraton for years, trying to determine where his and Rachel’s love story could be found in the plot of her novels. This is why Anders is determined not to let Elsy change anything—because “[e]verything [i]s just the way she had left it” (256). Though Anders and Elsy grow as characters and individuals while in Eloraton, the town itself represents their mutual desire to escape to somewhere where they are assured a happy ending.
The Cemetery of Deleted Things
The cemetery of deleted things that Elsy finds in an abandoned courtyard in Eloraton symbolizes the occasionally blurry line between reality and fiction. For the characters of A Novel Love Story, the line between reality and fiction is even less defined, as Elsy and Anders travel between these two universes. The cemetery in the courtyard is the only place where either character can get cell service, literally connecting them to the real world. However, the cemetery also connects these characters to the real world figuratively in the ways it links Rachel Flowers with the fictional town of Eloraton. With its deleted drafts and scraps of unfinished plots and characters, the graveyard is also symbolic of an author’s writing process and how much influence from the outside world can go into a novel. The various statues that Elsy sees as different versions of Anders highlight how Rachel worked her relationship with her fiancé into her novels through various characters and stories. In this way, Elsy gets a glimpse of what Rachel was thinking as she wrote her novels. Elsy frequently sees Anders returning to the courtyard, an act that helps him connect to Rachel again. Significantly, when she goes to the courtyard and sees all the discarded drafts and characters, Elsy understands that there is not always one clear-cut version of a happy ending but that, like stories, many take multiple tries and revisions.
Starlings
When Elsy first uses Anders’s guest room, he warns her about the starlings that live in the eaves of the bookstore. Elsy thinks this is strange, as both she and Pru have tattoos of starlings to represent their love for the Quixotic Falls series, in which starlings are a symbol. Starlings have a few layers of symbolism in the Quixotic Falls series and A Novel Love Story as well. Elsy and Pru frequently argue about whether the recurring motif of starlings that Rachel Flowers uses is symbolic of anything. While Pru thinks that they will come to mean something in the final novel, Elsy thinks they don’t mean anything, showing how novels belong to the readers and their different interpretations after they are published. In the bookstore, the starlings wake Elsy up every morning, tweeting the familiar tune of “Come On, Eileen,” which sounds sweeter to Elsy when she hears it from the birds. The starlings’ song is often accompanied by Elsy’s mix of hope and fear as she wakes up to another day in a fictional world. At the opening of their bookstore, Elsy tells Pru, “The starlings didn’t mean anything […] In the books. They were just birds,” to which Pru cheekily responds, “Maybe to you” (293). Again, the starlings symbolize the various ways readers can interpret a story, showing how different things can have different meanings to different people. Yet, in the broader scope of A Novel Love Story, the symbol of starlings and Elsy’s and Pru’s different views of them represent the unknown. Throughout the novel, Elsy struggles with the idea of what comes next, and to take a chance on herself, she must lean into this uncertainty, which is mirrored by the uncertainty of the starlings’ place in her favorite novels.
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By Ashley Poston
