“Desire is complicated,” says Nora, the charmingly caustic librarian in Rachel Meredith’s Girl Next Door.
Complicated is an understatement for this new romance novel.
Rather than delivering the familiar enemies-to-lovers arc, Meredith offers something more destabilizing – acquaintances to lovers to, perhaps, enemies (no spoilers here). The novel’s tension hinges on deception. Will our endearingly diffident protagonist MC (short for Mischa Celeste) and Nora become adversaries once their secrets are revealed?
Nora has published a bestselling romance novel, Girl Next Door – don’t we love a book within a book? – under the pseudonym S.K. Smith. MC, meanwhile, has been tasked with uncovering the author’s identity. The twist? Nora is MC’s former high school classmate and next-door neighbor, and the novel appears to fictionalize an imagined romance between the two.
Flattering … until it isn’t.
As MC reads Nora’s book, she can’t help comparing her real self to the idealized version on the page. Nora’s devotion, filtered through fiction, exposes MC’s deepest insecurities. At one point, MC reflects, “Even an imagined version of herself was too disturbing to confront.” It’s a cutting line, and emblematic of the novel’s emotional precision.
What emerges is a romance with real heft. Yet Meredith’s prose carries an effortless clarity that makes the novel feel buoyant rather than heavy. Girl Next Door is the rare book that wrestles with big ideas while remaining compulsively readable – you could easily devour it in a single sitting.
At its core, the novel explores “the total strangeness of being made fiction.” While Nora’s novel literalizes that phenomenon, Meredith suggests it happens constantly in everyday yearning. To long for someone from afar is to construct a version of them – to smooth edges, heighten virtues, and reduce contradictions. In doing so, we risk making the beloved less human than they are. Girl Next Door raises a profound question. Can desire survive contact with the unvarnished truth?
Importantly, Girl Next Door is about more than romantic resolution. MC’s arc is less about winning Nora’s affection than about reclaiming her own complexity. The romance becomes a vehicle for self-recognition. In confronting how she has been imagined, MC must decide how she wants to define herself.
For all its thematic ambition, Meredith never forgets to entertain. The banter sparkles. The sexual tension is skillfully drawn, charged more by what is unsaid than what is declared. Meredith demonstrates a keen sense of pacing, allowing charged moments to linger before puncturing them with a wry aside. The prose is confident and controlled, unshowy yet exact.
Even secondary characters feel fully inhabited. With Meredith’s vivid touch, figures on the periphery seem like people you might grab a beer with. Scenes crackle with energy, and the novel is studded with lines that invite a delighted pause. MC and her best friend Joe are inseparable “in the way of old married couples – not that either of them knew any of those.” When MC’s mother remarks that “babies have always fascinated me,” the statement deftly sketches her aloofness.
As the novel comes to a close and secrets edge toward revelation, the central question is no longer simply whether MC and Nora will end up together. It is whether they can face one another as fully human – flawed and unedited. Meredith suggests that genuine intimacy requires surrendering the tidy narrative in favor of something messier and more honest.
Desire may be complicated, as Nora says, but in Girl Next Door, complication is not a flaw. It is the point.
