There is a particular kind of madness that visits every writer at least once: the suspicion that the people we invent are far more alive than we are prepared to admit. Victorine E Lieske takes that suspicion, dresses it in a raincoat and a slow-burn blush, and pushes it straight through the page in Falling Into Fiction, the opening chapter of The Fictional Hearts Series. I went in expecting a rom-com. I came out having watched a rom-com happen to the very woman writing it and I confess I enjoyed the mischief of that enormously.
Meet Charlotte, our heroine, a rom-com novelist who has hit the wall every creative person dreads. Her deadline looms like dark clouds on a typical Mumbai July. She is worried about her main lead who refuses to acquire an edge that elusive, maddening quality that separates a cardboard cut-out from a heartbeat. She falls asleep mid-worry, the way we all do when the manuscript refuses to behave, and wakes to find herself inside her own book. It is the sort of premise that could collapse under its own cleverness, and yet Lieske keeps it standing. The terror comes first; the disorientation, the wrongness of a world built to one’s own specifications suddenly turning solid and only then does the swoon arrive.
And oh, the swoon. Let me be honest about what this book is, because I am fond of naming things plainly. Every trope you are anticipating is present and correct, filed and stamped. The confused, helpless girl adrift in an unfamiliar world. The pragmatic, handsome man, good at heart beneath the practised reluctance who helps her because of course he does. The shelter offered. The meal cooked with more tenderness than the recipe requires. The inevitable loss of balance that lands them, conveniently, upon each other. The shopping trip. The girl who returns the favour by helping the boy with his work. If you drew up an audit checklist of rom-com conventions, Lieske would clear the lot with a clean opinion and no qualifications.
Ordinarily, that predictability is precisely the risk that sinks a book like this for me. Here, though, the “falling into fiction” conceit is the collateral that covers the debt. Because Charlotte knows she is inside a romance. She recognises the tropes as they unfold, having written a hundred of them herself, and watching her fall for a man of her own invention, arguing with her own craft even as her heart mutinies against it, gives the familiar beats a delicious, self-aware wink. The trope is not a flaw when the character is in on the joke.
Lieske builds her people with genuine care, and the alternate reality is rendered with enough texture that Charlotte’s slow surrender feels earned rather than scheduled. What begins as panic softens, minute by minute, into something Charlotte cannot argue her way out of and that quiet capitulation is the story’s real pleasure.
Is it high literature? No, and it does not pretend to be. It is warm, comforting, faintly meta, and exactly the sort of book you press to your chest on a grey monsoon afternoon while Little Miss builds a fort at your feet. As the first instalment of a series, it does its job: I closed it curious about where these fictional hearts wander next.
My rating: 3.5/5
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
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