The Undermining of Twyla and Frank by Megan Bannen

“By the time Twyla and Frank arrived on the scene, two miles from the barracks, the flare had landed. They found themselves on a flattened plain, nestled in the jagged foothills of the Dragon’s Teeth mountain range. The flare’s harsh light glared across the landscape, outshining their saddle lanterns and casting everything in bright pinks and dark shadows, rendering the area even more otherworldly than usual. Stranger still, a luminescent substance glistened in odd patches all over the rocky ground.”

-The Undermining of Twyla and Frank by Megan Bannen

Every time I think the romance genre cannot possibly get any better, it does. Megan Bannen made me absolutely smitten with The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy, but with The Undermining of Twyla and Frank, it was as if she read inside my heart and told the story I most needed to hear. I will forever love this book.

Twyla and Frank are Tanrian Marshals. Friends and neighbors for thirteen years, Twyla and Frank have remained steadfast through anything that life has thrown at them. Twyla lost her husband Doug a long time ago, just like Frank struggled through his ex-wife Cora leaving him. Both characters are middle aged, their kids grown up. Twyla is trying to build a life for herself outside of motherhood, and Frank is looking toward retirement and doing what he most wants to do, ever struggling with thinking he hasn’t taken care of those he has loved the most as well as he could have. Being a Marshal has been a pretty slow job of late, but when they discover the body of another Marshal, Herd, covered in a strange looking substance, they become drawn into a more intricate case than either of them expected to work on, all while navigating their friendship and lives.

I think this book is so goddamn fucking perfect.

I hardly ever get to read romance books where the characters are middle-aged. Where they have both been married and the marriages were not ‘happily ever after.’ Where the characters realize that the choices they made when they were young weren’t what they wanted for their entire lives, but they just didn’t know it at the time. And that’s the thing about life. You think, especially when you’re young, that you know it all. You think you know how it will all pan out and you make decisions based on those feelings, but then one day you wake up and realize (in the words of Twyla) that you are a chair. There for someone when they need to sit, but forgotten the moment they walk away. And when you reach that crossroad, you are left with the fact that you need to rebuild a different life for yourself, seek happiness again and ask yourself what it is you really want.

I might be rambling. BUT. I want to keep rambling for a moment. I love love. I believe in love, but I did love that Megan Bannen showed that not all marriages last, not all are meant to last. (I’m getting divorced, so this bit hit me in an emotional way). And I loved that she showed how hard it is to be a mother. It’s incredibly worthwhile and amazing, one of the most powerful and inconceivably strong loves in the world, but it’s also the hardest damn thing. And so, I want to share this part because I almost cried, and I want to sincerely thank this author for seeing so many of us moms and sharing our experience in Twyla’s own words:

“You and Everett want to get married? Fine. But you need to recognize the fact that you’re the one who can grow a person inside you. And you think you know what that means before you do it, but you don’t. You have no clue until you’re already knee-deep. It means never having enough to eat, or never being able to eat, because you’re too busy throwing up. It means peeing every five seconds. It means your boobs hurting and your ankles swelling. It means varicose veins and hemorrhoids. It means messing up your back for the rest of your life. It means rearranging everything inside you. It means your body is never the same again. It means being exhausted in ways you never knew possible. And it means dealing with all of that while trying to make it through each and every day like a functioning adult. And Everett, the person with a different set of equipment, won’t begin to understand what you’re going through…

And that’s only the beginning, because once you push that child into the world in a way that is incredibly hard on your body, not to mention dangerous, you’ll be the one with the equipment to feed the baby. Even if you decide to bottle feed, even if Everett promises to do his fair share, you are going to be up to your eyeballs in crappy assumptions from the days of the Old Gods that because you come with the equipment, you are somehow magically endowed with all the knowledge of how to be a parent, how to feed and clothe and diaper and take care of that precious human you put into the world. And that assumption touches everything. Everything. You’re the one who inherently knows how to navigate doctors’ appointments, babysitters, school, homework, when your kid needs new shoes, when your kid needs a hug, when your kid needs help. It will all fall to you- all of it…”

Twyla and Frank are amazing. Their story, this book, is perfect. Megan Bannen could write about anything at this point, and I would read it.