Into The Blue by Emma Brodie

Into the Blue opens in the summer of 2000, with AJ Graves stuck in a dead-end job at a video rental store in small-town Massachusetts, nursing dreams of writing for Saturday Night Live and rewatching a cult sci-fi show called Astronauticals on repeat. Then Noah Drew walks in. He’s the youngest member of a famous acting dynasty, and his great-aunt Eudora, a theater legend in her own right, takes the two of them under her wing to teach them “phasing,” a kind of hyper-intense improv technique that’s supposed to blur the line between performance and truth. That setup could have felt gimmicky, but Brodie sells it. The scenes of AJ and Noah training together have a charge to them, and I bought into the idea that these two built something real before either of them understood what it was.

Then Noah disappears without a word, and the book jumps forward seven years to a reunion on a TV set, where AJ and Noah end up cast together in a project literally called Into the Blue. This is where the book is at its best. AJ has clawed her way into a writing career, Noah’s become a full-blown celebrity, and watching them navigate being back in the same room, professionally and otherwise, gave me exactly the kind of tension I want out of this genre. Eventually we learn why Noah vanished: he found out he carries the gene for Huntington’s disease, the same illness that killed his mother, and he’s been trying to keep AJ at arm’s length ever since rather than watch her live through his decline. It’s a genuinely devastating piece of backstory, and Brodie doesn’t lean on it for cheap sympathy. It actually explains Noah’s behavior instead of just excusing it.

My problem is what happens after that reveal. AJ and Noah spend a huge chunk of the book meeting up, pulling back, dating other people, ghosting each other, and then finding their way back together again, only to repeat the cycle. I understand the emotional logic of it; Noah genuinely believes he’s protecting her, and AJ genuinely can’t quit him, but the execution stretches that dynamic out far longer than it needed to. By the third or fourth round of will-they-won’t-they, I wasn’t feeling the ache of two people who can’t stay apart anymore. I was just waiting for the plot to catch up to the inevitable. There’s a difference between longing that builds and longing that stalls, and for a solid stretch in the middle, this book stalls.

That’s frustrating, because everything around that central relationship is genuinely strong. The improv world Brodie builds feels specific and lived-in rather than decorative, Eudora is a great presence whenever she’s on the page, and the parallel tracks of AJ’s writing career and Noah’s rising fame give the book texture beyond just the romance. I also give Brodie credit for not softening Noah’s illness or turning it into a plot device that gets conveniently resolved. It sits at the center of the book’s tension the whole way through, which is more honest than a lot of romances would bother being.

I liked Into the Blue quite a bit, and if you asked me right after finishing it, I probably would’ve called it great. But looking back, that middle stretch of back-and-forth drags enough that by the time the book was working toward its ending, I was less invested in the emotional payoff and more just ready to see these two stop circling each other. That’s not nothing; a book with weaker foundations wouldn’t have earned my patience in the first place, but it kept this from being a book I’d call a favorite.

I’d recommend it to readers who like slow-burn, long-timeline romances and don’t mind an extended will-they-won’t-they, especially if you’re a fan of stories set in the performing arts world. If you tend to get impatient with couples who keep almost getting there, you might find the middle section as frustrating as I did.