Lidija Hilje’s debut Slanting Towards the Sea was recommended to me by a friend on Litsy because I loved The Paper Palace. I can sort of see the similarities, but Hilje’s novel will not be replacing Cowley’s book in my heart.

Ivona lives with her elderly father in Croatia. She’s working a dead-end job at a stationery store and spending her free time stalking her ex-husband, Vlaho, on social media. She doesn’t really have to stalk him; she is friends with Vlaho and his new wife Mariana and godmother to one of Vlaho’s two kids. In fact, she is the one who introduced Mariana and Vlaho.

Ivona and Vlaho met as students in Zagreb.

I was only nineteen, yet the country I had been born in had dissolved, the state I was born in had fought its way back to independence through a bloody war. The currency had changed three times before I turned eleven. […] I had been born into socialism and autocracy and was now living under democracy and capitalism, or as close to it as the transitional economy could get.

It is this changing world that helps shape their relationship. They meet at a bar, where they bond over their shared love of music and Vlaho tells her “You may have just become my favourite girl.” They are — bar a couple minor hiccups — pretty much inseparable from that point on.

Predictably, the course of true love never runs smoothly, and their relationship is complicated by a lack of financial stability (post graduation, Vlaho lands a job at a bank, but Ivona has difficulty finding a job in her field) and other issues that cut a little closer to the bone. Eventually, Ivona leaves Vlaho, but not because she doesn’t love him, thus the Internet stalking and attending child-related events. Seems like unnecessary torture to me, but the heart wants what the heart wants. And it seems like Vlaho feels the same way, especially when a new guy enters Ivona’s orbit.

Slanting Towards the Sea is not a straight up romance. The book has things to say about family relationships and obligation, heritage, and history. This is a book that very much made me want to visit Croatia some say; it sounded beautiful. Hilje is writing in her second language, English, so sometimes the writing did feel a little stilted to me, but there were also some lovely moments.

Much like in The Paper Palace, there’s a significant event that tears our lovers apart. I can’t say that the event in Slanting Towards the Sea, while certainly difficult, comes close to matching what the lovers in The Paper Palace had to endure, but the characters sure do make a lot of it – to the point of Ivona sabotaging her own happiness. There were some other things that didn’t really work for me, either, the truth about Vlaho’s marriage to Marina for example.

So, while this book didn’t quite land for me, it certainly has lots to recommend it: a stunning setting, lots of angst and an ending that, while contrived on one level, mostly stuck the landing.