1000 Words on I Didn’t Know I Needed This

I’ve got a type. A literary type, at least.

Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, which I recommend to everyone and anyone. Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn that was read in various cafes across Berlin this fall. How to Date Men When You Hate Men by Blythe Roberson, which I read overlooking Vancouver’s North Shore mountains at a time when dating terrified me. And All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks, which I found in a Toronto bookstore this past weekend.

It’s a type, and I’ll admit that I don’t like to date — I mean read, outside of it.

I Didn’t Know I Needed This: The New Rules for Flirting, Feeling, and Finding Yourself is Eli Rallo’s debut novel and it’s definitely my type. Tall, shaggy hair, athletic, ideally from a different country with a thick accent. Wait…wrong type. Oops!

Anyways…I began reading Eli’s guide for 20-somethings while visiting my Dad out West for the holidays. And as someone whose parents separated as an adult, it’s an extraordinarily strange thing to ease into; the division of holidays. But I was doing my best to adapt as we unwrapped presents in matching plaid pyjamas.

I’d gotten a copy just before Christmas at a bookstore in downtown Calgary and read a few chapters while sitting on the loungers in my aunt and uncle’s ranch overlooking the Rocky Mountains. But I didn’t pick it up again until February, the month of love, and thought it was a fitting read as Valentine’s approaches and the…